Chapter 9

Review and Learn From Your Results, and Keep Testing and Optimizing

In this last chapter, you will review and learn from your website optimization efforts over the last few months. You will also learn how to take action to get the most out of your optimization and testing efforts in the future. Remember that website optimization isn’t just a one-off ­project—it should form a continual critical part of your online business strategy.

Chapter Contents

• Week 27: Review and Learn from Your Optimization Efforts So Far
• Keep Optimizing and Testing: Your Website Is Never Perfect!

Week 27: Review and Learn from Your Optimization Efforts So Far

In this last and very important week, you need to review and learn from your website optimization results so far and see just how far you have come with your efforts. In particular, you need to review your test results and their impact on your success metrics and website conversion rate, and then review how your internal organizational optimization efforts have been faring.

Monday: Revisit Your Success Metrics and Targets

Before you tackle the rest of this week, you need to have been using the best practices and test ideas described in this book for at least two or three months. This is important because it takes some time for all your efforts to begin to work together to impact your success metrics and conversion rates.

The first thing you need to do is review Chapter 2 for the key success metrics for your type of website and check the targets you set for each of them. Then you need to log in to your web analytics tool and pull the last seven days of data from it to see how they compare to your target. If you have improved your web analytics weekly reports to include all these success metrics, it will make it much easier for you to check these (and great job for adding those!)

Hopefully after two or three months of testing and optimizing your website, you should have seen some percentage point lifts for many of your success metrics and overall website conversion rate. If you have double-digit percentage lifts, then you have been doing a fantastic job. For any success metrics that still seem to be low and not improving, you need to devote more time in the next few months gaining more insight into these and testing some different ideas on problematic pages.

Specifically, you need to make sure your conversion rates are improving for your home page and key conversion flow pages (whether this is your checkout flow or a conversion flow more unique to your website). And don’t forget to check to see how your efforts have fared to improve your traffic source first steps of these conversion flows, too.

Another significant indicator of your optimization success so far is to revisit and check your repeat visit rate. A well-optimized website is likely to have your visitors coming back far more often than before. So go ahead and log in to your analytics tool to review your new repeat visit percentage for the last seven days; it should be higher than it was when you first checked in Chapter 2. If it’s not much higher, revisit Chapter 8 and consider trying some of the other ideas that you may not have tried yet, such as setting up a related online community, blog, or newsletter. While these may seem hard to create and run, the benefits can quickly add up.

It’s also very important that you don’t stop testing just because you may have seen some good lifts in your success metrics and conversion rates. As you learned about in Chapter 4’s testing best practices, you really need to be learning and iterating from your tests to achieve even higher conversion rates and success metric lifts. If you have beaten any of your targets (or are close to beating them) you should now set some new ones to try and beat over the next three months. Then you need to continually check these success metrics and conversion rates on a quarterly basis, and set more targets for them each time.

Tuesday: Review Your Use Case Completion Rates and Resurvey Your Visitors

Next you need to revisit the use cases you created for your website in Chapter 4 to see if these are any easier to complete. These use cases are the most common important things that visitors need to easily achieve on your website. Ideally, your website optimization efforts have not only improved your success metrics and conversion rates, but also made it easier for your visitors to complete these major use cases.

And bear in mind that sometimes you may have inadvertently pushed a winning test that actually makes it harder for visitors to complete a use case, or you may have launched some new content or functionality that makes it harder, too.

Therefore, you should revisit the use cases that you created in Chapter 4, and try doing each one on your website, regrading the ease of completion. Some of them should have higher completion grades—at the very least they need to be just as easy to complete as before. You also need to use the website feedback tools like Loop11 or UserTesting that were discussed in Chapter 5 and see if your website visitors can complete your use cases well enough (hopefully even easier). This puts your use cases to the ultimate test.

If you find use cases that are still no easier (or worse) to complete by you or your visitors, you need to devote extra time over the next few weeks to try and optimize related pages for the use cases that are problematic and improve the visitor journey through completing it.

Next, you need to continue to involve your visitors’ all-important opinions and feedback and rerun the visitor website surveys that you set up in Chapter 5. It is important to hear their latest voice on things you may have changed or launched through your optimization efforts, and when you are setting up the survey questions you should ask questions about those topics. You should also try gaining visitor feedback by asking questions on your web-chat tool if you have added one of those on your website.

Remember that ideally you should get visitor feedback before launching any major change to your website, because a negative response from them can have major negative impact on your conversion rates.

Wednesday: Rerun the Website Optimization Checklist

While reviewing your optimization efforts over the last two or three months, you may be excelling in some areas, but not in others, and it’s important that you pinpoint these areas needed for improvement. For example, you may be doing a great job of testing your shopping cart and home page, but you may not be doing much targeted testing or gaining very much insight from your visitors.

To make sure you are doing as much as you can to optimize your website, you need to revisit the website optimization checklist found in Chapter 3. Go ahead and answer each question in Table 9-1, which is a blank copy of the same checklist. To really make sure you have a well-rounded website optimization program you need to make sure you are ticking as many of these yes checkboxes as possible—and be as ­honest as you can too!

Table 9-1: Website optimization checklist

After you have gone through the questions in this checklist, go back and look at how you originally scored back in this checklist found in Chapter 3. You should have added at least five yes checkmarks; if not, then you need to spend more time focusing on these efforts with some help from other team members (or website optimization consultants). You should also note down anything on this checklist that you still haven’t done yet, and pay particular attention to trying those in the next few months.

Thursday: Review What You’ve Learned from Your Test Results to Create Better Future Tests

Today, you need to review two very important other things. First, you need to review your test results for learnings to help you create better future tests. Second, you need to review how your internal efforts and processes have been working to set up and run these tests and identify areas of improvement that are still needed.

To get started, go ahead and spend some time reviewing all the tests that you have run, and find the ones that have the highest impact on success metrics and revenue. You should be able to detect some patterns or trends with your best performing tests; maybe particular visitor segments are always performing better or particular modules across your pages are highly influential on conversion.

Don’t just ignore your bad test results though; you should also look at the ones that had a negative impact. Then you need to try and understand why that might be the case, and to look for any common patterns or issues. For example, certain people may be continually contributing bad test ideas, or you may find you are often using poor choices for multivariate tests.

Performing this review is critical because you need to continually iterate from your test results to create ones with even better results in the future.

While you are reviewing your test results for common findings from best and worst results, you also need document your key findings. This is because you need to create a presentation to review with your testing key stakeholders. Reviewing this with them will help inform them of your progress and will help you build a testing culture and an optimization organization (your recent efforts to build this will be reviewed next).

Also, if your testing has really paid off and you are getting amazing ROI, this is a great time to ask for increases in testing budget by presenting some of your best test results to your senior management. Gaining increases in the budget might mean you can start using another visitor feedback tool, hire another testing team member, or invest in a better testing tool, all of which are going to be very helpful on your path toward an effective long-term website optimization program.

Friday: Review and Improve Your Internal Testing Process Performance

As you learned in Chapter 3, one of the most critical things to realize is that you need much more than just a testing tool; you need an organization that is set up to deliver a high number of high-impact tests—an optimization organization.

Hopefully, you have identified and begun to address some of your problematic internal barriers and HiPPOs that were covered in Chapter 3 and begun to crack some of the biggest issues embedded within your organization that may have prevented you from testing effectively and efficiently.

Therefore, next you need to take some time to review how your efforts have progressed toward growing this optimization organization. Go ahead and create a report on what has been working well and what still needs improving. You will present this, along with your test results findings, in a quarterly review meeting that you will be planning. Use this list of optimization organization elements to review in particular:

You should also have started sending regular testing email updates because not only do these help keep everyone in the loop regarding your testing efforts, but they are also key to helping build a testing culture. You should also have already started running or preparing testing training sessions for your team members because these can be a very cost effective way of improving testing skill sets of your team.

After you have done this review of your internal optimization process, the next step is to go ahead and schedule a first quarterly testing and optimization review meeting with all of your key stakeholders. Here you will review the report that you have been creating this week that summarizes your learnings from test results and how your testing process has been working and what needs improving. This review will be vital to fuel your website optimization and testing efforts over the next quarter to keep up momentum and should help you come up with a list of new things to test and process improvements to work on.

Also, it’s important to keep your eye on the progress that your company is making toward becoming a full-fledged website optimization organization. The best way to understand this is by printing out and studying the website optimization lifecycle that was discussed in Chapter 3 and continually drive your online business toward the last step of it, the optimization organization. And remember to consider outsourcing and partnering some of your testing efforts so you can learn and gain more expertise that is necessary for this type of organization.

Keep Optimizing and Testing: Your Website Is Never Perfect!

Just because you have read and implemented some of the best practices and test ideas in this book doesn’t mean your work is done or nearly over. This is because website optimization is a continual process—a journey, not a destination. Ideally, testing should form the bedrock of your online strategy, and nothing should be launched without testing and optimizing it first.

Finally, you also need to realize that your website is never perfect; you shouldn’t think of it as completely finished. You are likely to be (and should be) continually adding new features, functionality, and content that will need optimizing and testing to better engage and convert your visitors.

Because of this, I suggest you pick up and review this book every six months and apply the best practices and test ideas on anything that has changed on your website (and remember, parts of your website may often change without you even knowing it—many companies build or change different parts of websites in silos). Rereading this book will also serve as a good refresher and reminder of the best practices in the four necessary disciplines of website optimization: web analytics, website usability, online marketing, and website testing. In fact you should go ahead right now and put this time in your calendar to help remind you to review this book again in the future.

You should also always be on the lookout for new things to improve and test on your website. One of the best ways to do this is by keeping up to date with the latest website optimization techniques, case studies, and tools. To help you keep informed with this you should subscribe to the many optimization blogs that are listed here: http://bit.ly/optimization-blogs

Another way to come up with test ideas in the future is by using competitive intelligence that you learned about in Chapter 4. Therefore, you should run quarterly checks on your competitors’ websites and industry-leading websites to see what new things they are doing to come up with some new test ideas (and go ahead and schedule this time in your calendar too).

And last, don’t give up if you have a few bad test results, either. Indeed, it can often take several iterations of your tests to find some that really hit home in terms of conversion and success metric lift. If you really are struggling to make any progress toward optimizing your website after reading this book, you should find a good website optimization consultant or agency to help you.

See you in another six months when you review this book again, hopefully with an even more optimized website!