Optimization aligns web development with strategic goals and helps us understand the exact impact of any website change before we invest in it. It helps the business succeed. Yet the road to optimization maturity is not easy. As organizations move up the optimization maturity curve, there are common barriers inhibiting their progress. This practical guide is full of proven strategies to help you overcome those challenges, so you can take full advantage of the power of optimization

Five Steps to a Better Web Optimization ProgramA practical guide to overcoming barriers along your journey

Table of Contents

Reaching Web Optimization Maturity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Steps to Success. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Get it Right from the Outset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Learn More. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

E N T E R P R I S E I N F O R M A T I O N M A N A G E M E N T 3

FIVE STEPS TO A BETTER WEB OPTIMIZATION PROGRAM

W H I T E P A P E R

Reaching Web Optimization Maturity

Optimization can be a formidable business enabler. It aligns web development with strategic goals and helps us understand the exact impact of any website change before we invest in it. It allows visitors to tell us their likes and dislikes through data and helps us prioritize investment decisions based on that data rather than gut feel, accumulated experience, or internal politics. It helps the business succeed. Yet the road to optimization maturity is not an easy one. As organizations move up the optimization maturity curve, there are common barriers inhibiting their progress.

But the path to optimization maturity need not be arduous. Based on tried and tested approaches gathered through the longest experience in the conversion optimization industry, the following steps can help you overcome barriers and take advantage of the power of optimization.

Steps to Success1. Challenge the skeptics

For your organization to reach the highest levels of optimization maturity, your team must believe that testing brings real and sustained value. They must understand the vital role testing plays in allowing visitors to communicate their likes and dislikes through data, so that you really understand what works best for customers, and therefore the business. Testing doesn’t only allow you to verify a change from a visitor perspective; it allows you to quantify the exact gain or loss in revenue or conversions a specific change might bring.

But plenty of skeptics feel testing is a poor investment. Not bought into its value, these individuals prefer to trust their own judgment or that of “experts,” when it comes to website design decisions. A web designer, for example, will no doubt have a strong view of what is aesthetically pleasing, what look in line with current fads, and what is easy for customers to use. But, without being grounded in data, this subjective insight is based almost entirely on their individual experience and personal taste. It’s impossible to show conclusively whether an expensive website change proposal will help or hinder the business.

Organizations must help individuals become aware of their own limitations. They must demonstrate the importance of letting data drive decision making rather than letting individuals rely on their own, often unconscious, biases.

Run a simple competition that asks anyone affected by testing or optimization to predict the outcome of real tests. Which variation generated more revenue? To which picture did more young people respond? The sometimes surprising outcomes will help people better understand their own weaknesses and biases and build support for relying on testing and data.

2. Failed tests add value too

Conventional wisdom dictates that to be successful a test has to find a new solution that works better than the current one: increasing conversion rates, clickthroughs, or some other metric. Tests that don’t show lift are a failure and a waste of valuable resources.

But a test that fails to find a better solution can be as valuable as one that succeeds. It can help rule out costly potential web development investments that would not have delivered the desired outcome or, worse still, would have had a detrimental impact on the business.

Developing a culture that understands that a test doesn’t have to find a better solution to be a success helps organizations eliminate any negative perception of testing.

As long as the tests you run are well thought out and implemented carefully, you are likely to see a rise in the number of tests that don’t deliver a better solution as your optimization program matures. This is simply because you are exploring beyond the norm.

E N T E R P R I S E I N F O R M A T I O N M A N A G E M E N T 4

FIVE STEPS TO A BETTER WEB OPTIMIZATION PROGRAM

W H I T E P A P E R

A willingness to devote at least some of your optimization efforts to testing more radical hypotheses will give you a greater chance of uncovering those big opportunities that have the potential to transform your business.

3. Put testing and optimization at the center of web design and development

Organizations generally have limited budgets available for web design and development. They will want to prioritize investments based on capacity to increase revenue, engagement, or any other strategic goal. Testing and optimization provides an ideal tool for prioritizing these investments – a role that will also help it gain wider visibility and buy-in across the organization.

To ensure investments are prioritized on what is right for the business (rather than on internal politics or ego), organizations should require web teams to verify the value of their proposed investments through a test program before they receive any funding. Every test request would be accompanied by a realistic hypothesis detailing the anticipated value of the change in terms of the organization’s strategic goals.

One way to implement this would be to establish a central team with full responsibility for managing corporate web design and development funding and prioritization. To attain the funding they need, individual web teams would need to validate their proposals through that centralized testing program.

The test program would ensure web teams think twice before moving ahead on changes that don’t support strategic goals. The central team would insist that web teams would need to convince their own business unit – which would have to fund these changes itself – that, despite the evidence, their ideas really are the right way forward. They would need a really compelling argument to make that stick.

Where politics do come into play, the strategically-aligned testing program will have buy-in and support from senior management. It will have the backing it needs to remove any egos that are hampering attempts to ensure investments are prioritized based on what is good for the business and not on individual prerogative.

4. Balancing general practices with local needs

Many companies have multiple websites, with just a small number receiving the majority of website traffic, and smaller sites focused on specific audiences with specific optimization needs. They might, for example, include a brand that appeals to youth, so need to be optimized for mobile devices. Organizations find it difficult to adequately test across all sites, taking into account the needs and capabilities of both their larger core and smaller websites.

To address this, organizations must first recognize that the sites that receive the most traffic will have the greatest impact on their strategic goals. The more visitors a site has, the more revenue it is likely to generate, the more important it is from a business perspective, and the more crucial it is to get it right.

Equally, the more traffic a site gets, the better suited it is to comprehensive testing. For example, if you need to test five different banners and seven different navigation bars with 16 different images then you have 560 variations that you need to test against your incoming traffic. You need a lot of traffic simply to be able to test this many variations and your smaller sites may simply not have enough.

You should run your most sophisticated tests on your largest and most important sites. Once you’ve verified the variations that work best on your larger sites, roll out those same principles and practices as a baseline for your smaller sites. You can then test and refine each smaller site for its specific audience.

W H I T E P A P E R

www.opentext.com/contactCopyright © 2016 Open Text SA or Open Text ULC (in Canada). All rights reserved. Trademarks owned by Open Text SA or Open Text ULC (in Canada). (06/2016)05118.11EN

FIVE STEPS TO A BETTER WEB OPTIMIZATION PROGRAM

5. Express changes in terms of business value

Often once a hypothesis has been verified, any changes required have to wait in a long queue before they can be implemented by the very busy IT department. It may take weeks or even months. If changes are related to a specific campaign, IT may not be able to respond during the time the campaign is running. Bigger changes may not be implemented until long into the future, with the organization missing out on a small fortune each month while it waits.

The way forward is simple: express the value of the changes in terms of their contribution to the objectives of the business, in terms of hard revenue or improved engagement.

Changes that bring significant strategic value will then be implemented in a timely fashion. Features with the highest value will gain priority when it comes to investment of development resources. After all, no CIO will be able to justify delaying investments proven to deliver real business value.

Mature organizations have also empowered their optimization team to eliminate delays further. They have either given the teams the know-how and ability to implement the changes directly or positioned them over those in IT responsible for implementing the changes. IT reports to optimization rather than optimization having to join IT’s queue. This makes optimization more successful, rapidly delivering value to the organization in line with its strategic goals.

Get it Right from the Outset

When implemented effectively, optimization can deliver value quickly. To unlock these benefits and safeguard ongoing improvements, organizations need to establish the right behaviors and buy-in at the outset. Get optimization right today and you will achieve better outcomes tomorrow.

Working with a partner with the most experience in the conversion optimization industry will help you succeed. It will help you reach the top of the optimization maturity curve without having to reinvent the wheel.

Learn More

If you are interested in learning more about overcoming barriers on the road to optimization maturity, you can find more resources – including our Optimization Maturity Model white paper – at optimost.com.