Lesson in copywriting that I learned from my 7-year old daughter
My daughter is in 2nd grade and sometimes she takes lunch from the school cafeteria. She told me a fascinating story about something that happened at lunch at her school.
The “World Famous” Cheese Sandwich
In her school cafeteria they serve a “Cheese Sandwich” every day and very few people choose it for lunch. This week on Friday the cafeteria changed the name of item to “World Famous Cheese Sandwich” and a ton of more students went for it.
When I asked her if the sandwich was truly different she said that most kids said it was the same thing, but their teacher told them that it had 3 slices of cheese instead of regular 2.
She said, “Isn’t it amazing how 2 words – World Famous – made so many students choose Cheese Sandwich?”.
I used this as an opportunity to introduce her to the idea of “Copywriting” and how powerful the right set of words can be to boost sales.
Actually it is not a vs question at all, because you are not comparing apples to apples. But they both essentially solve the same problem for you, i.e. trying to make sense of how users interact with your site.
In case you don’t know what Mouseflow is, it is a mouse tracking software and it can record user session and all activity around mouse clicks, keyboard strokes etc. Another similar software is Inspectlet, you can check out both. I am assuming that you already know what Google Analytics is.
The idea behind this post is to help the new business owners understand that Google Analytics might not be always the default analytics solution for your site. In fact, if you are just starting with your website and getting 10s of hits per day rather than 100s or 1000s, I would suggest that you focus more on Mouseflow rather than Google Analytics. Simply, because observing user behavior, even though indirect via recordings provides immensely more value than simply looking at the Aggregate of the data that Google Analytics would provide. It has helped us a lot in understanding user behavior on Shruti’s new venture www.ohappysunshine.com
Couple of really interesting findings from the mouse tracking
Size chart — We saw that a lot of users would search for “Size chart”, even though it was on the product page. It turned out that size chart was the last word in a long product description section and no-one was really reading that.
Blog to Product page — We saw that a lot of traffic was coming onto blog from facebook, but the users would not follow through to the product page. We observed that the users scrolled through the blog archive and tags section in right-nav and didn’t check the top nav. So we simply added, Product Collection link in the Right nav. And just like that, we could see a lot more conversions from blog to the product pages.
There’s a ton of more insights we got from mouse tracking, that have helped us improve the user experience. I listed those two give you an idea of what to expect.
More than that, just viewing each user session in isolation gives a much more in-depth understanding of how things flow rather than the consolidated picture.
Have you guys used Mouse Tracking on your website, how has been your experience?
