Last Thursday, the 23rd Dialogue Thursday (DiDo) will take place in our Utrecht office. During this event - for clients, existing and new relations - the sharing of knowledge and thought leadership is central. The 23rd edition was all about the pitfalls of Conversion Optimization. For the 23rd edition, we had the pleasure of welcoming Benjamin Groenewoud of Travix and Denise Visser of bol.com. What do they run into when setting up an optimization program and what do they read about it?
Benjamin is CRO Manager at Travix, the online travel company that in 2016 overtook KLM in terms of online revenue and knocked it off its #1 listing in Twinkle. Since his first years as a web analyst and conversion optimization at SNS Bank and Mirabeau, among others, he has been preaching the data-driven and evidence-based way of working. Always from the idea that conversion optimization is not a person, but a ’way of working.
During his presentation, Benjamin showed how Travix's optimization team has grown from a lone warrior to a team of specialists in CRO and A/B testing. But this growth was not without trial and error. Benjamin mentioned five pitfalls that he and his optimization team ran into and learned from.
You don't do CRO on your own but with a team consisting of optimization specialists coming from different disciplines.
Set up experiments to improve your conversion rate and learn more about your visitors' behavior.
Many optimization projects have a short-term focus while CRO has value only when you learn from it. The first step is growth: adding immediate value. The second step is improving your customer intelligence. Finally, you start working on optimizing your decision making process.
Try to involve all colleagues in the optimization process. Travix's ultimate goal is to transform into an ‘Evidence Based Army’ in which the data-driven and evidence-based testing culture of the CRO team spreads to all other product teams within Travix.
To learn, you need a certain speed. Done is better than perfect.
Denise Visser, with her 15 years of experience, including nearly 10 years at bol.com, is a senior digital strategist who knows how to bring different disciplines together. She has witnessed bol.com's growth over the past 10 years and bol.com tops the list in the Twinkle 100 with retailers such as Wehkamp, Zalando, Coolblue and Amazon. From her current role as UX Business Architect, Denise's wonderful challenges include getting (and keeping) over 55 scrum teams intrinsically involved in conversion optimization. Denise also shared her experiences in the CRO field with us on Thursday.
Set yourself a goal, which will make you more critical.
Experience shows that small changes do not provide immediate value. The goal of many tests is often to be able to add, change or remove elements without negative impact. Test variants are now often put live with no uplift in conversion.
By running more tests on a hypothesis, you have more certainty about the outcome of a test. To structurally achieve business value, we need to rely less on chance hits.
There is a lot of value in developing good hypotheses as they allow you to learn from all your testing. The goal of A/B testing is always to learn more information about your visitors.
Too often tests are run and then not saved so the information gained is lost. Even tests without winners are valuable to your optimization program.
It is often not entirely clear which steps were taken to reach a certain goal, causing parts of an optimization process to be overlooked. By using process mining, for example, it becomes clear how different projects or teams are connected.
On June 8, we will host another Dialogue Thursday. Do you want to be there? Then sign up via info@onlinedialogue.com.
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