Why You Need Continuous Optimization
June 28, 2013 By Greg Cassar 4 Comments
How often does this happen:
A company budgets for a website, it’s built according to the budget and then it’s done.
Hooray! … and everybody moves on to other important things.
Unfortunately too often.
Declaring it done is a waste of money
Your website is not done. Declaring it done is arrogant, stupid and will cost you a lot of
money.
A newly built website is a hypothesis at best (hopefully it was designed with the user in
mind). Now the real world test starts – and with it the process of continuous optimization.
No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers
- Steve Blank
If you just allocated a budget for launching a new site, you basically paid for a rough
diamond. It works, but it doesn’t sparkle. A cut and polished diamond is worth so much
more.
It’s impossible to know in advance what will work the best for your customers. Yes there are
heuristics and best practices, but they are a mere starting point for optimization. Once your
new site is launched, you need to start optimizing it to figure out what works the best.
Optimizing is the best thing you can do for growing your revenue.
A mindset change is needed
The era of just building websites, and keeping them the way they are until the next “new
website” project, is gone. If you’re stuck in that mindset, your business is going to shrink and
your smart competitors are going to eat your lunch (and dinner).
Your website budget has to include continuous optimization – it’s a non-removable part of
your website. Having a website is not a goal – it’s a means to an end – revenue. Optimization
is about getting MORE revenue out of your website (improved marketing efficiency).
It takes (depending on your traffic volume) at least 6 to 12 months to pick the low hanging
fruits and get the initial gains (often very significant amounts of extra absolute dollars
earned). But it doesn’t end there – it’s a non-stop process. When the conversion industry
creators, Eisenberg brothers, work with a client, they have a 3-year perspective in mind.
My friend Chris Goward advocates what he calls evolutionary web design – ditching radical
makeovers at all and just replacing it with continuous improvement. I support that idea
wholeheartedly (with some exceptions – there ARE quite a lot of awful websites out there
that have nothing going for them, those need a fresh start to get moving + continuous
optimization).
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been doing it for a long time. You may *think* you know what
people want and how they want it. However, you don’t – you must talk to people, understand
them and run experiments.
For you to achieve your goals, visitors must first achieve theirs.
– Bryan Eisenberg
Data, Not Intuition and HiPPOs
Most sites are still built the stupid way – based on a committee meeting (where none are
conversion analysts) or the HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion).
Another prominent approach is copying what your competitors are doing. Trust me, most of
them don’t know what they’re doing, and their website looks the way is does due to a
combination of random factors. Plus, they probably copied somebody else.
That’s a surefire way to crappy results, but even that could be salvaged and turned into
something that works through experimentation and continuous improvement.
Continuous optimization is based on actual user behavior data. “But we used data when
designing the site!” Great! We should use behavior data every time we design a site! The
problem is that even when your new site is designed by solely relying on user behavior data,
it is a design based on data that happened in the past, on the old site. Your new website is a
great hypothesis at best.
Better than the average person, but that’s not enough
Every conversion consultant has heard this a million times: “So what will our conversion rate
be after you work on our site?“ If someone indicates they can answer that, they’re lying.
Nobody can.
My friend Craig Sullivan says that even though he’s run thousands of tests over the years,
and he’s better at guessing the outcome of the test than an average person – he’s still not that
much better than flipping a coin. And this guess is made when running experiments based on
solid data! Experienced optimizers know that you can’t be sure of anything – especially when
you’re designing a new site.
Your success depends on the number of experiments you run and the speed of
implementation. Knowing what to look for, how to operate with the data and using a
structured approach will ensure your experiments are done right and they actually have a
chance of achieving significant lifts. Traffic and time are precious resources that shouldn’t be
wasted on random tests.
Marketers still rely on intuition
A study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies found the vast majority of
marketers still rely too much on intuition – marketers depend on data for just 11 percent of all
decisions.
Funny that almost 100 years after the book Scientific Advertising came out we’re still relying
on intuition more than anything. Dan Ariely notes in this excellent article:
Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with
overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen
people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies
won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.
Sadly, we the people are lazy and we’re after the one true answer. We want it now, without
testing and experimentation. We want to believe our intuition or some experts’ opinion is the
final truth. It’s not. Ariely again:
When we pay consultants, we get an answer from them and not a list of experiments to
conduct. We tend to value answers over questions because answers allow us to take action,
while questions mean that we need to keep thinking. Never mind that asking good questions
and gathering evidence usually guides us to better answers.
This study shows that an incremental 241 percent ROI can be generated by applying data to
business decisions. And 91 percent of CMOs believe that successful brands make data-driven
decisions, as per Columbia Business School.
If your website was built based on intuition, HiPPO and mere best practices, you’re losing
money every single day. You could be earning a ton more, but your website sucks.
Stop paying attention to your competitors and best practices, and start benchmarking against
your customers’ expectations. Can you meet or exceed those expectations? Your conversion
rate will be a leading indicator.
Build – Measure – Learn
Ever thought that Lean Startup methodology and conversion optimization are similar? You’re
right, they are. In fact, I’d even say that the overlap is so huge, they’re almost the same thing.
In the end it’s about growing a company by figuring out what the customer wants and how
they want it. (By the way if you haven’t read The Lean Startup yet, pick it up now – it’s
amazing).
The critical piece of the puzzle is this diagram:
This is the process to follow on your website too. You have some ideas (based on data – both
qualitative and quantitative). You build a website – and measure *everything* that’s going on
there. You do whatever it takes to gather useful data – web analytics, user behavior, usability
tests, email tracking- everything. You end up with a bunch of data, learn from it – and form
new hypotheses for new experiments. And repeat, repeat, repeat. You just keep
experimenting.
Bid data and research for research’s sake are stupid. What matters is what you do with the
analysis and data you have – you don’t want to be “data rich and optimization poor”. One
execution is worth more than all the unimplemented analysis in the world.
Structured approach to testing
Split testing via spaghetti method (testing random things and seeing what works) will only
take you so far. Companies that employ a structured approach to testing get way better
results.
Continuous optimization starts with a strategy – having an idea of what a successful
conversion optimization system looks like, how to define the right goals, prioritizing where to
test, how to plan for rapid-cycle testing and so on. Companies that have a structured approach
to conversion are twice as likely to see a large increase in sales.
• Measure. You can only improve what you can measure, so measure everything. Be clear on
your business goals, benchmark your competition for ideas, dig in your web analytics data,
conduct customer surveys and analyze search behavior on your site.
• Analysis. Once you know your goals, it’s time to figure out what’s working well, what’s not
and why. Analyze your content for relevancy and clarity, figure out if it matches user needs,
do usability testing and analyze user paths/journeys on your site.
• Test. A/B and multivariate testing are the two most valuable methods for companies to
improve conversion. Prioritize tests by potential value and cost.
• Optimize. After conducting tests, implement successful design and content changes.
It is a rather simple concept, but it is also complex as you can go very deep in analysis (too
deep for your own good). To get the most out of your analytics — or just your optimization
efforts — develop a cost-effective, smart system for improving continuously.
Conclusion
Your website budget needs to account for both – getting the initial version done and running
continuous optimization programs on it for 12 months or more. That’s the way to keep
growing your sales while minimizing waste and achieving your potential.
Optimization never ends since the world is constantly changing – user preferences, devices
they’re on, their mindset, market conditions, and so on. What worked yesterday won’t
necessarily work tomorrow. Keep experimenting.