As your A/B testing, optimization, and personalization program begins to grow and gain traction within your organization, marketers often find themselves faced with this challenge:
How do you determine which tests to run? Prioritization can seem especially daunting when multiple stakeholders are involved and there are multiple departments competing for real estate across your company’s website. In order to simplify this intimidating task, the Oracle Maxymiser Consulting Team devised a simple list of considerations for you to make when evaluating a test campaign and placing it on your testing roadmap:
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Does this campaign help me reach my program’s overarching goal?
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First and foremost, all campaigns you plan on running should be gut-checked against your optimization program’s overarching goal. If you have been tasked with increasing revenue generated by the sale of ancillary products by 15% over 6 months, then almost every test you run should be focused on driving visitors to purchase those ancillary products.
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It may make sense to incorporate smaller, more tactical campaigns into your roadmap in order to make smaller tweaks to the user experience. Campaigns that do not directly correspond with your main goal should be more carefully scrutinized.
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Is there data to back up this hypothesis?
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The most objective way to prioritize your test ideas is to use data to support your test concept. Your organization already has data points about your customers’ — whether you have site analytics, data management platforms, user experience insights, behavioral data, or any combination of them, your optimization strategy should be leveraging these data points to prioritize, determine potential ROI, and develop a strategic roadmap.
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Reviewing your existing site data is a great way to identify pain points and come up with campaign ideas in the first place.
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Is there enough traffic volume to test effectively?
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Depending on your industry and level of traffic to your site, this can be one of the most important questions to ask yourself when building out your testing roadmap and prioritizing campaigns. Even clients with high traffic volume sometimes want to test low-traffic pages and/or segments of visitors that are too small to reach statistical significance within a reasonable timeframe.
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Oracle Maxymiser’s Test Duration Calculator (seen below) is a great tool to leverage to estimate how long your campaign will need to run.
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Is the potential financial impact greater than other testing ideas?
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The closer the change you are making is to the main KPI, the greater the odds are that your test will have an impact. For example, if your main goal for optimization is increasing lead form submissions from enterprise product pages, changing the messaging and/or call to action on enterprise product pages will have a greater impact than testing the hero image on the homepage.
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Do any organizational considerations need to be made?
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If your test idea is radical, conflicts with brand guidelines, requires timing considerations due to other marketing initiatives, relies on seasonality, etc. then you may need input or approval from other departments before launching. This question is imperative to ask as waiting for approval from other teams can significantly delay launch dates.
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Often times my clients are inundated with test ideas and have multiple stakeholders pushing their goals on the testing team at once. When these situations arise, it is important to take a step back and review all of the above considerations.
In addition to using the above five points to vet test ideas, you can also use them to create a campaign idea scorecard. You can even create a living document of test ideas with an associated point system for each category. The campaigns with the highest score can then be moved to the top of the roadmap and ordered based on other marketing initiatives, seasonality, time to develop, etc. Living campaign roadmaps are a great way to show your organization the thought process behind which tests come to fruition and which ones die on the vine.
Want to learn more about how the Oracle Maxymiser Consulting team can take your optimization program to new heights? The Oracle Maxymiser Consulting team is made up of passionate strategists, designers, developers, quality assurance professionals, trainers, analysts, and platform experts. We’re excited to understand your business needs and work with you to drive ROI.
Contact us here or find out more information about Oracle Maxymiser (and the rest of the Oracle Marketing Cloud suite) at our home on the web.