Prioritizing web initiatives – finding a way to actually optimize
Why don’t they have a better website? It’s a common question that we’ve all said or perhaps heard about our own sites. While theory says no obstacle should ever stop us from optimizing, improving and delivering an appropriate customer experience, unless you are a CEO with a massive cash surplus, theory is only good on paper. Reality on the other hand dictates that we do the best job we can with finite resources, competing proprieties and a whole host of obstacles.
Even though we can’t get it all done and few of us are lucky enough to have a team of analysts, UX experts and support staff sitting by to tell us what to improve first there’s a lot that can be done. The idea is to approach everything as if you were going to do it right – even if what is done is ultimately quicker, dirtier and more constrained than you would like. The right approach makes for changes that matter rather than just throwing mud at the wall in the back conference room.
Analytics drive the best changes. In a constrained environment or it becomes easy to listen to what the executive team thinks is important or what we feel is the first priority but this defies the simple truth – we are not the customer. The best way to approach and prioritize site changes is by looking at the numbers and seeing what people are actually doing or not doing. For example, while adding a slick one-page checkout system may seem like a great way to pick up extra holiday sales, when analytics show that conversion rates are solid and email response is falling off the priority should clearly not be on the “best practice” first. Similarly if users are abandoning landing pages left and right, building new acquisition campaigns is definitely not the first place to focus.
Numbers are important for another reason – they validate the expenses associated with work effort. It doesn’t matter what a site’s goal is lead gen, ecommerce, exposure, or whatever it may be, there are always ROI metrics both hard and soft that must be identified and monitored against all projects. ROI isn’t just a function of acquisition or customer growth either – impact can be to long term retention, engagement, decreased customer service calls, and a host of other factors. Establishing return benchmarks sets the platform to grow the team over time and values the website to the organization allowing for an accurate discussion of larger initiatives down the road.
And ROI isn’t just about media or agency costs against sales. To effectively manage a limited team and finite resources a cost has to be put against in-house resources both in time expended and opportunity loss. For examples, user reviews are a seemingly straight forward tool that most e-commerce sites have or is on their short term roadmap. Because the feature is basic it’s tempting to build rather than buy but in reality this is almost always a terrible idea. Setting up a new system may only cost a few thousand dollars in initial resources but those same resources are pulled off of work that could not likely be outsourced, like better product pages, updates to transactional emails and other tasks that get swept under the radar. Over the long term the ROI case is incredibly simple – how many man hours are going to be put into building a feature which may start as simple but which will require perpetual upgrades and attention instead of expending a few dollars to keep those resources focused on growth areas.
As sites become older and grow it becomes tempting to just do something – a refresh, a quick couple of features… something. This is a dangerous tactic as redesign projects are the very definition of scope creep and the less planned, the more it grows. Spending big dollars on new designs, feature additions and campaigns is far more difficult to justify than simply reassigning a few resources but a year later when the work is still going, hindsight hurts. Instead of looking at the short term for a site it is essential to balance between functional changes that the business demands, like new product launches, campaigns and other programs while at the same time defining those long term upgrades.
While it’s easy to dismiss process as overly burdensome [there’s plenty of truth to that], process is a necessary evil to make accomplishments. Looking at the realities of the customer needs, the existing site and the actual resources at our disposal allows for prioritization that actually makes sense.
