#12 – How To Build A CRO Roadmap

My name is Khalil Slade and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live Hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like it's no big deal, while pretty.

Much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we will talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh man, I bring tough questions like do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are. But we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live Hour podcast today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts. In order for you to create a conversion rate optimization RO roadmap, there's two elements that need to go into it. First, the research piece. I need to do a whole bunch of activities to come up with conversion problems on a website, usability issues on a website, revenue opportunities on the website, three different categories that I'm going to be evaluating. In order for me to uncover those three different categories, I'm going to do different exercises. I'm going to do some customer and user research, whether it's the jobs to be done, interviews on site, surveys. I'm going to do data analysis on, looking at your analytics, your heat maps, your session, recording funnel analysis. I'm going to be doing usability testing. I'm going to be doing expert reviews or heuristic analysis. All these different activities will generate a large list of items that you need to fix on a website. Great. So I've generated this humongous list of items. Some of those items will be identified using different means. I've identified that there's a problem here I've identified through using heat maps. I've also identified when I talk to customers and I also when I did the usability test, the same problem popped up again versus another problem that I've only heard about from the expert review that we've done. So different problems are identified, sometimes multiple ways, sometimes in a single way. You end up with a list. And this list of possible things that you can fix on a website could be humongous. I have seen websites with 150, 200 items. I've also seen websites with 30, 40 items. If you have unlimited time, unlimited resources, have at it. Fix all these issues. Most of us don't have that luxury. So what we need to do is we need to prioritize the list of items. It's a very high level what you are looking for. The items that will have the most impact and require the least amount of effort. Your golden nuggets correct the things that will actually help us. So we need a methodology to prioritize the 100, 150, 200 items. There are different schools when it comes to CRO. Generally speaking, how I judge the quality of a framework is by giving the same set of items to three different CROs and tell them, hey, why don't you go ahead and use this framework to prioritize the 150 items that we've identified, give it to three different people, and then I compare the results. My first specialist, my second specialist, my third specialist using the same framework, how much intersection do we have? What's item number one? What's item number two? What's item number three? Some of the frameworks are so simplistic. The set of items one specialist are going to come up with is going to look so different than the set of prioritization that second specialist is going to come up with, because there's lots of subjectivity in those frameworks. The more subjectivity that the framework uses, the more variation you'll have in the prioritization that these frameworks generate. The framework generated by CXL perhaps was one of the better frameworks to try and remove lots of the subjectivity that we see with other frameworks. What we've done at INVASP is we said, you know what, even with the framework generated by cxl, there is high level of subjectivity in it. So if I give some of the initial frameworks a grade of 10%, I think I would give the framework by CXL 70%. But we wanted to get to a 90%. And again, I have a way of measuring that. We looked at all these different frameworks and we said, okay, what are the elements? So now for us, for every element on our conversion roadmap, we evaluated using 18 different metrics. Of those 18 different metrics, I would say two or three of them are subjective. There is 15 of them that are not subjective CROs specialists will agree on. Guess what? I minimize to a great extent the subjectivity that I end up with. So that was a really good step. Is that your full conversion roadmap? It's not. This is a conversion roadmap for, I would say, three to four months. You know what you're going to focus on in the first three, four months. But you will always be updating that roadmap based on the testing results that you get. I always say a conversion roadmap is really solid in the near future, in the first three months. And the further down you go, six months, nine months, 12 months, it's more hazy. Correct. Because there's just a lot of other factors that are going to happen nine months and 12 months from now. So we need to have the flexibility in whatever roadmap that we're going to be working on to accommodate for all the possible changes that could happen as we are trying to improve a website experience.