Conversion optimisation is the science of improving conversion rates on your website and beyond. Where running some simple AB tests on your website was once a competitive advantage, the widespread adoption of conversion optimisation now means that to remain ahead of the pack requires greater maturity and sophistication in your approach.
How can you tell if your business or team have a mature approach to conversion optimisation? What level of conversion maturity are you operating at? What do you need to do to take your efforts to the next level?
The best way to know what maturity looks like is to look at how mature optimisation teams approach conversion optimisation differently. After that, we’ll look at some false flags. The factors that might feel like they are signs of maturity but actually aren’t.
Maturity indicators - what mature testing organisations are doing
Narrowly defining goals and KPIs for conversion optimisation
Defining a clear goal for your conversion optimisation programme is the single most important part of your process. The pressure on teams to influence and report on multiple KPIs often means that conversion optimisation is expected to be the silver bullet and increase conversion rates everywhere all at once. Narrowing the focus of your optimisation efforts to a single goal, preferably a single KPI, will result in more targeted tests, greater insight, more actionable data and better results.
Strategic planning for both the short and long term
Advanced optimisation teams plan their strategy for achieving their optimisation goals across both the short-term and long-term. Long-term strategic planning should focus on prioritisation at the high level of goals and priorities. Conversion optimisation is an ongoing process. It’s not possible to do everything at once, so plan and prioritise the areas that you will focus on right now and those that you’ll focus on later in the year. In this way, you can keep your focus narrow and ensure you have a clear plan for achieving your goals.
Strategic testing vs tactical testing
Conversion optimisation tends to be split into two activities. There’s user-research and data analysis, and then there’s testing. A tactical approach tends to isolate these two activities from each other and consider each piece of research and each experiment as a standalone item. Advanced optimisation teams view testing not as a tool for increasing conversion rates but as a tool for answering questions. Starting with the big picture, they identify the business questions that need to be answered. They then break these problems down to define the tests and research that they need to complete to validate their hypotheses and answer that question.
Deep integration of data and tools
We’ve already covered that conversion optimisation maturity isn’t dependent on having the most expensive tools. What mature testing teams do have is a clear strategy for integrating and connecting their optimisation tools and data to get more value from every piece of research and every experiment. The end goal is to be able to report on your experiments against the metrics and KPIs that the business truly cares about, in the platforms that people in the business look at.
False flags - what maturity in conversion optimisation isn’t
Velocity - The number of tests you’re launching
This is one of the most common pitfalls teams encounter when trying to evaluate their conversion optimisation output. The number of AB tests you’re running per month is appealing as a metric because it’s easily measured, and surely more is better right? The problem is that having this as a target encourages a “that’ll do” mentality where the pressure to just get the tests live means you lower your standards and expectations for the test quality, and ultimately the impact. Whilst increasing the number of tests you launch is an indicator that you’re certainly testing more, what it doesn’t tell you is if you’re testing the right things, in the right way. Mature teams focus instead on what impact their testing is having.
Complexity - The size of your tests
There’s a misconception in conversion optimisation that if your tests aren’t “big” then you’re not being ambitious and they won’t have an impact This leads to a tendency to want to make every experiment big, with many changes being made at once. A better measure of maturity is to be testing big concepts, not running big tests. Businesses with a very mature approach will look for what we call the minimum viable test. Put simply, how can you explore or validate a concept in the simplest way possible, using the least resources. This allows you to achieve more with the resources you have, and ultimately get more value from your optimisation efforts.
Enterprise-level tools and technology
You can’t buy maturity in conversion optimisation. No single tool out there is going to overnight take you from a low to a high level of maturity. Having a data and technology strategy is essential, but the adage of a tool being only as good as the hands that wield it is as true in conversion optimisation as anywhere else. No shortcuts here!
Having a growth team
It certainly sounds cool to have a growth team, but not having one doesn’t mean you can’t have a mature approach to conversion optimisation. Good news for those of you out there that are the single champion of conversion optimisation and experimentation in your business. It’s certainly harder on your own but you can still adopt the practices that define maturity.
By Kyle Hearnshaw, head of conversion strategy at Conversion
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