Episode #2: Thinking Fast & Slow in CRO

June 14, 2021

What's this episode about?

Timestamps

0:00 Introduction

1:20 Defending System 1

8:46 Frequent exposure bias/Mere exposure effect

11:46 Bandwagon effect

16:07 Sunk cost effect

19:33 Contrast effect

22:16 Decoy effect

25:42 Hot hand fallacy

29:43 Insensitivity to sample size

33:04 Rhyme-as-reason effect

34:50 Present bias

40:11 Final thoughts 

43:05 Bloopers

In the second episode, we decided to look at some cognitive biases that could be used in CRO, on websites, or in digital marketing in general. Rather than trying to find examples of these biases in the wild, we decided to see if we can come up with examples where they could apply to our own business and website. Some of them are good and reasonable, some of them not so much and exist purely for illustration purposes. Either way, it’s important to understand how biases can be used in marketing to influence behavior. 

We’re Gerda and Ryan, two Conversion Optimizers who started a company last year. Since we work with websites, it’s only fitting that we create one for our business. When we work on clients’ websites we usually do a lot of research first to find hurdles and come up with solutions that would actually make the website better. In our case, we had to create everything from scratch leaning on our previous experience. We decided to treat this process as an ongoing case study and document our thought process behind it. As experimenters, we’re going to make a ton of changes to this site and try out different solutions all the time so this is just the first crack at it.

*Some resources we talked about:* 

The book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

List of cognitive biases - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Articles about biases in conversion optimization:

https://adkonversion.com/en/blog/cro-19-cognitive-biases-to-optimize-your-marketing-conversion/

https://cxl.com/blog/cognitive-biases-in-cro/

https://www.invespcro.com/blog/the-reason-cro-is-flawed/

https://www.convertize.com/cognitive-biases-conversion-rate-optimisation/

https://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/cognitive-biases-cro.htm