Marketers these days have a ton of options when it comes to new technologies. We’re regularly approached by sales reps telling us just what we need to optimize our digital efforts and solve our key issues. But adopting a new technology can be a slow and painstaking process: You need executive buy-in, knowledge of how it might impact other teams, and a cultural or technical audit to ensure it can even be implemented.
Is your organization ready for a website testing tool? My first bit of advice is: Don’t get one just because you think your competitors use one. My second bit: Don’t get one just because you think you need one! Neither scenario necessarily leads to valuable data results. Instead, consider the questions you’d like to answer about your site, as well as the problems you’d like to solve for it. Would testing your website help you achieve that?
If the answer’s yes—great! Here are three scenarios that might signal it’s time for your marketing and optimization teams to start using a website testing tool.
1. Your bounce rate is increasing and you don’t know why.
What if you’ve done everything right—minimized funnel length, followed design best practices, and so on—but your bounce rate is still going up? If you’re wracking your brain to pinpoint the reason why visitors are leaving your site, despite the fact you’ve put time, thought, and care into its content, delivery, and layout, consider running an optimization test with a strong testing tool.
“But shouldn’t I have been testing all along? What if the ‘best practices’ I implemented weren’t as ‘best’ as possible, given they weren’t informed by testing?” Don’t get hung up on this. Yes, the ideal scenario is rather postmodern: to always have already been giving visitors an experience you built from hard-earned test results. But it’s never too late! (And don’t fall prey to the investment fallacy!) If you start testing now, you can stop guessing and start using clear data to justify changes to your site. These justifications will matter to the executives who fund your ideas and the creators who build them (as we’ll explore shortly).
For example, if visitors keep bouncing from your Shipping Details page, testing will help you identify the root cause. Are your rates too high? Does your layout make the rates look like ‘hidden costs’? Is it too hard for people to update their address? Finding the source of the issue helps you fix it and give users a better customer journey.
2. You have too few people to carry out all your website ideas.
We all fight tooth and nail for development resources: the designers, copywriters, coders, socializers, and more who are the lifeblood of every website. With so much business in the digital sphere, teams constantly pressure these builders to deliver project after project—with each team suggesting its particular initiative is the one that really matters. We’ve all lived this nightmare, and it’s just not sustainable.
So help out your colleagues! Free up creatives’ time and help them feel the weight, goal, and importance of their work, because it’s rooted in cold hard data: Run tests! If your business is Agile enough to accommodate regular site changes, test to determine priority: the mandatory changes, the ones you’d prefer but don’t need, the ones you can ignore for now, and the ones you can forget.
In this way testing can make collaboration easier: revealing the data-driven rationale behind marketing’s requests, and eliminating the asks rooted in unproven ideas.
3. You have enough website traffic to yield clear, meaningful data.
So, you’ve got a too-high bounce rate and a too-low number of website builders. Testing is the magic salve, right? Well—half-right. The other half is your own website traffic. Without enough visitors to your website, your tests won’t yield data you can trust—and untrustworthy data is unusable data. (And if you have Big Data goals, “veracity” is one of the 4Vs!)
What’s the right number of people? There isn’t a set ratio of visitors per time frame that automatically means you’d get trustworthy results and should therefore start testing. Instead, this threshold must be examined on a case by case basis (and at Oracle Maxymiser, that’s exactly what we do.) How much traffic you need depends on the complexity of the tests you plan on running and how long you plan to run them.
I can, however, give two big definitives. 1) Oracle Maxymiser clients are suggested to receive an average of 10,000 visitors per month in order to take full advantage of our powerful testing solution. 2) The more traffic you have, the faster you aggregate data, which means the faster patterns can emerge in customer behavior. And you can, of course, parlay these patterns into revenue-driving decisions.
But don’t be deterred from testing should your site have low-trafficked pages! With the right tool you can figure out how to push more traffic to that page, enabling you to test it later. Experienced testing vendors (like the award-winning Oracle Maxymiser) can also help you tweak your testing strategy, so even in low-traffic areas you can learn something new about your site, its segments, and its potential.
The time is probably now!
The old owl from Schoolhouse Rock was right: Knowledge is power! The more you test, the more you discover about visitors’ wants and needs. From there, the more capable you are to make data-driven decisions that lower the bad rates (e.g., bounce), boost the good ones (e.g., conversion), and unite other teams under marketing’s vision.
And testing is just one part of a good CXO program! Once you start testing, doors open to segmentation, targeting, and personalization, which can inspire you to build journeys even more engaging for your customers.
It’s your company’s website, and a great deal has been invested in it. Strategize beyond instinct alone: Go with data, and make everyone grateful—from creative to the C-suite—that you’ve got numbers in your corner.
Written by Brittany Coombs, Demand Generation Manager at Oracle Maxymiser
