A Bird In The Hand: Is Paying Attention Your Greatest Growth Hack?

By Suneet Bhatt

Did you read the introduction to this book? Did you read any of the chapters before this one? Do you plan on paying attention to the rest of this paragraph or are you going to skim directly to a headline,, visual or number below that catches your attention?

We are all time constrained. I am deeply empathetic to people who feel their attention being unabashedly courted and pursued, leaving them with no other option than to skim and accelerate their way through life. It’s not like anyone’s making it easier for us to focus.

When I worked at Chartbeat, we started using our relationships with media companies to find creative ways to tell stories that capture attention. Our metric, Engaged Time, the time people spent interacting with a piece of content, was directly tied to attention (not to transactional metrics like page views, but on captured, tracked engaged time) and so it made sense. One of my proudest moments running Marketing and Sales was when we collaborated with Farhad Manjoo on this article in Slate titled: How People Read Online: Why you Won’t Finish this Article .

It was amazing that our data was being used to tell a story through a featured columnist in a major publication.

What stuck with me more powerfully was the truth of the article: people weren’t paying attention and every day, people were paying less and less attention.

Why Does Attention Matter for Growth?

That was 2013. Now, people have less time, more distractions and as a result, are equipped to pay even less attention.

That’s challenging if you’re someone in marketing, growth or sales. The funny thing is that for all of our complaints about our customers not paying attention to all the answers and solutions we offer – we’re doing them an even greater disservice. We’re charged with growing our businesses but we’re not spending much time paying attention to our visitors, our readers, and our customers: capturing data, and then testing ideas that would spark that growth.

As individuals charged with growth, we know what we want (marketing ROI, marketing efficiency, competitive advantage), and we also have clarity on what the highest ROI tactic is at our disposal (CRO). Yet what Neil Patel also learned when he conducted his survey is that only 1.7% of Marketing budgets are allocated to CRO.

What Gives?

Much of the tension here can be attributed to what’s referred to as “the paradox of happiness.” We know what makes us happy long-term (eating well, sleeping well, exercising) and we know them well enough to recite them when queried. When push comes to shove and it’s time to act, we’ll very often choose the thing that gives us short-term happiness even when we know it’s not the right long-term decision.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is the right long-term decision. CRO is the process by which you monitor, analyze and understand user behavior, then run tests in an effort to optimize user experience toward a goal or an outcome.

“We’re charged with growing our businesses but we’re not spending much time paying attention to our visitors, our readers and our customers: capturing data, and then testing ideas that would spark that growth.” #TheGrowthHackingBook #GrowthHackingMovement #GrowthHackingDay #GrowthHacking

Paying attention is the right long-term decision. It’s just not as sexy as a new trend, a new channel or a new buzzword. As a result, it doesn’t get celebrated nor does it get prioritized.

We know it’s not being prioritized because we surveyed 1350 self-identified Marketing and Growth experts .

When we talk about a bird in the hand (vs. two in the bush), we’re referring to the missed opportunities we have right in front of us. A whopping 69% of Marketers are ignoring the bird in the hand: existing visitors, readers, users and customers.

How convinced am I that paying attention is a differentiator? Based on this one single data point, we have proof that if you’re paying attention to why people are and aren’t hitting their goals, you’ll instantly be in the top one third of Marketers. Paying attention is the clearest and easiest way to separate you from two thirds of your competitors. In the context of the MarTech Landscape this means you’ve just left over 4,000 companies behind, in the dust.

There’s nuance to the remaining 69%. Of the remaining 69%, almost half are only doing one thing that qualifies as CRO and 14% are doing absolutely nothing. I’m impressed they took the time to answer honestly. It tells me how strong the competition is for their time and ultimately that’s what we heard, people are too busy. A popular answer. In the end, people arrived at the same conclusion in different ways:

“I am mostly busy throughout the day and do not have time.” “I’d say it’s a combination of reasons. One, a lot of the analytics software is costly. Sure some are free or lower cost, but everything adds up. Another is the hassle or being busy with other things on your website.”

Superpowers Don’t Make a Superhero

Marketers know what to do. But knowing isn’t enough. You have to do something with the knowledge you have.

The same thing can be said about paying attention. Paying attention helps you identify what is and isn’t working. That knowledge isn’t a superpower, that knowledge doesn’t make you a superhero unless you apply it and take action against it.

Take the 15 Minute Challenge (aka the Power Quarter Hour)

One common misconception about paying attention: it doesn’t actually take a lot of time to be impactful and meaningful. It takes the right timing and it takes the right reinforcement. It’s possible.

1) Block 15 minutes on your calendar every week

To start, block aside 15 minutes on your calendar to spend time paying attention to how people are experiencing your website, your application, your products and your brand. Set the meeting as a recurring event at the same time every week.

• Do you want to start your week with inspiration? Reserve time on a Monday morning after you’ve completed your Monday morning required work (checking email, planning your week, etc.)
• Do you want to reinvigorate yourself mid-week? Reserve time on Wednesday as a way to bridge the start and end of your work week.
• Do you want time to marinate on ideas over the weekend? Close your week with a Friday afternoon block of time. This will give you data to plan in your subconscious over the weekend which you can use to kick off your week when you get in on Monday morning.

2) Spend those 15 minutes paying attention

Pay attention for 15 minutes with the purpose of finding a missed opportunity, an area where people are getting stuck, and with the goal of developing a hypothesis on something to improve. There are thousands of tools out there for you to use to pay attention to how people are experiencing your application. The important thing is that you make the time to pay attention to those experiences. Focus on pages, tools and content that were a meaningful investment of your team’s time (new product, primary CTA, payoff feature) and that attract meaningful engagement from your customers (lots of users, viewers, readers). Nailing the right framework and focus upfront ensures you’re looking at experiences with volume (traffic, scrolls, clicks) to support, followed by hypotheses to test against.

• Are your primary CTAs aligned to where people are paying attention? One of the biggest and most consistent things we highlight when we consult with a person using Crazy Egg is the power of a Scrollmap (scroll depth) contrasted with a Heatmap (clicks). Put simply, if 100% of people aren’t seeing your primary goal for the page (a button, a form fill, a content piece), you haven’t designed your page appropriately to align attention to engagement. We see this on everything from landing pages and homepages through to key aspects of a web application or dashboard. At Crazy Egg, we use this to make sure the domain entry CTA on our homepage is aligned with 100% of the people arriving on our homepage.

Here you can see that between 97-100% (scrollmap on the left) of visitors to our homepage are seeing the primary domain entry CTA (primary cluster of clicks on the heatmap).

• Are you watching recordings of people as they make it to and through your most important page? Too often analytics solutions focus on an individual page and don’t put that page in the context of an entire website experience. Additionally, while funnel views on their own show averages and high-level flows, there’s no substitute for following a user on their actual journey. If you watch Recordings of a user as they work through your site or application to a primary goal page, you’ll quickly see where users are getting stuck and what’s getting in the way. At Crazy Egg, we used Recordings to completely redesign our JS Installation experience; specifically how we let users check and verify if their JS has been installed correctly (if at all). It’s worth noting that we have an exceptionally high JS installation rate; but when we watched the experience, we realized we were confusing customers and burning goodwill for those who managed to succeed despite our design.
• Are you segmenting people based on how they arrive to your site or app? It’s incredible what the power of simple filters can do to help you transform your experience. Are people interacting, clicking, or scrolling differently on mobile vs desktop devices? How about new people arriving on your pages for the first time vs those who are returning? Have you segmented clicks and other types of engagement by referrer? I’d assume your paid traffic interacts with your site differently than your organic, which is different again from how someone from a referral partner may interact. At Crazy Egg, we use some 100 segments and filters in the product to quickly see if we can identify different behaviors based on those contexts. We recently spent a lot of time rebuilding our blog and tracking how we refer blog readers to our product by following engagement from different UTM codes.

Each of the above actions (there are others, like polling people on your site and asking them questions) took 15 minutes to analyze and arrive at a hypothesis. We’re not looking for hundreds of ideas; instead, this approach is designed to help you find the one, single most impactful thing you can do this week – and then equip you with the data and assets to evangelize that inspiration across your organization.

3) Translate your hypothesis into action

This is the key step: once you harness the inspiration, it’s time to take action. There are plenty of tools you can use like the Crazy Egg A/B Testing Tool, to make changes yourself like moving buttons, changing headlines, and repositioning elements on a page without needing a designer or an engineer.

If you do need support to translate your hypothesis onto the page, invite your engineer, designer and other team members to join you on your 15-minute journey each week. Your commitment should be to leave that session with one task to prioritize in the spirit of paying attention to your customers and improving their experience.

Here’s the thing: if you embrace Step 2 and focus on the highest investment pages with the highest engagement, you’ll undeniably find one clearly inspirational thing you want to test. That’s all that matters to put you ahead of the majority of your peers and competition.

As you revisit this cycle each week, your eye for opportunity and your sophistication around what you can execute on will increase as well. You will slowly gain the confidence to identify, extrapolate and test more.

Not because your past tests were all successful, on the contrary; specifically because some weren’t and you realized — you still learned something powerful about your audience and their experience that will make you better as a company.

I’ve run countless failed tests and experiments in my time. I can’t think of one that cratered a business. The only ones that had any modest negative effects were the ones I wasn’t paying attention to after launch, one’s I should have turned off sooner; reminders about the importance of paying attention and that we are always learning.

Do Something

It’s too easy to feel informed and smart without doing actual work these days. There’s so much content. There are way too many thought leaders (where are all the thought followers?). We’ve become accustomed to making decisions based on other people’s data.

That used to be okay because competition wasn’t as fierce. It’s not okay today, because now there is too much competition and the people we’re trying to serve have higher expectations.

Paying attention to the people who are using your tools, products and services is going to make your business better. Based on the data, it’s actually going to put you in a position to leave your peers and competitors behind.

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. “

- John Ray (1670)