Conversion · 6 min
Research before testing. Analytics shows where people leave, recordings show what happened, and asking customers shows why, and the three together usually make testing unnecessary for the first round of fixes.
How it works
This narrows the investigation from a whole site to a specific moment, which is the only part testing tools are good at telling you.
Session recordings and form analytics show the behaviour behind the number: a field being retried, a button being tapped repeatedly, a page abandoned mid-scroll. Most sites contain at least one outright fault found this way within an hour.
A single question on the confirmation page (what nearly stopped you from enquiring) produces more usable insight per hour than any other method available, and it surfaces objections the team had never considered.
If research reveals a broken mobile form or an unanswerable question, fix it. A/B testing a known fault is a way of spending traffic to confirm something you already established.
Below a few hundred conversions a month, tests rarely conclude, and teams read noise as insight, which is worse than not testing, because it produces confident wrong decisions.
Usually not for the first round. Research typically finds outright faults and clarity problems whose fixes do not need validating. Testing earns its place once the obvious is fixed and the remaining questions are genuinely uncertain.
One question on the confirmation page asking what nearly stopped them. It is cheap, it runs continuously, and it surfaces objections nobody internally had considered.
Research before testing. Analytics shows where people leave, recordings show what happened, and asking customers shows why, and the three together usually make testing unnecessary for the first round of fixes.
You have read what we think. If you want to know what it means for your case specifically, describe it and we will tell you which parts of conversion research guide actually apply — and which do not.
