Prioritizing testing ideas is the key to seeing the greatest ROI on your optimization efforts. Learn testing prioritization best practices from the pros and create an organized and efficient testing process.
How do you create a world-leading optimization team? One that you can trust to consistently deliver ROI year after year? Dedicated internal CRO teams are becoming increasingly common within businesses. As more and more companies adopt the testing culture, they start to ask the same questions:
– Where should we start testing?
– What happens when tests start losing?
– Is there an “optimization ceiling”? When is it reached?
– How do you prove a testing program’s value over time?
My guess is that if you’re watching One Minute Mondays you’ve probably spent a ton of time looking around the web for great test ideas — so many ideas, that you don’t even know what to run next. That’s where prioritization comes in. How do we do that? It’s pretty simple. We want to estimate what the ROI of each test will be.
Prioritization is the million-dollar question in optimization programs. It gets at the heart of our most frequently-asked question at Optimizely: “What should I test?” A strong prioritization process arms a growth marketer with the answer: “Here’s what we’ll test, in what order, and here’s why.”
Last week, we met Pauline Marol, the Lead Product Manager for optimization at Hotwire. Pauline’s prioritization process is a framework that keeps her optimization engine running smoothly with hundreds of ideas in the backlog and helps the very best ideas surface so they can be tested quickly.
As Pauline describes it, her prioritization “removes the emotion from A/B testing.”
Prioritization is a critical skill to master when building out a testing program. It’s about making smart choices and applying discipline to the decision-making process.
In my experience helping companies build their test programs from scratch, as well as optimizing more mature programs, I’ve seen the benefits of adopting a rigorous prioritization scheme time and time again. Based on experience working with Optimizely customers, here are three crucial key steps to follow when bringing prioritization into your optimization strategy.
When I’m not running experiments on Optimizely’s conversion funnels, I love to interact with the optimization community. GrowthHackers has one of the best communities out there and last week I hosted an Ask Me Anything (AMA). The questions were very high quality and covered topics like running multiple tests at the same time, how to overcome technical hurdles, how multi-armed bandits can be helpful, what to do with inconclusive tests, and more.
If this piques your interest, have a read through the questions and, of course, continue to ask me anything.
