Prioritization Frameworks: An efficient process for conversion optimization
“Ideas are great — no doubt — but what do you do once you have an entire backlog of ideas?”
Why do you need a prioritization framework?
You and your team have come up with 100 ideas on what to test to optimize your website but how long will it take you to test 100 different ideas? Also, how sure are you that these 100 ideas will have an impact and increase conversion rate?
This is why you need a prioritization framework, one that eliminates bias and subjectivity in selecting tests that will bring about significant changes.
Prioritization helps to:
Manage stakeholders
Bring transparency to optimization
Build trust from the company
Empower employees to share ideas that they feel will have an impact.
So, what is prioritization? Put simply, it’s a critical part of building an efficient, impactful testing program.
But before you create a framework, there are things you should know:
1. Know your destination/Know what you want:
Testing profile: Are you a beginner or advance in optimization? Are you going to test incremental changes or bold new features?
Product strategy: Where do you want to take your product? You need to know so that you can prioritize your test accurately.
Optimization goals: This could be the conversion rate or any other metric you want to focus on.
2. Know who you are:
Get your analytics right: Where are the pages you need to work the most? Where in the funnel are you having high drop-offs and high performance?
Talk to your customers: You need to know what they like and don’t like.
Look at your competitors: Look at what they offer their customers and use that to find where your gaps are.
3. Structure your ideas:
Translate ideas into hypothesis: Now that you have ideas on what to test, it’s time to turn them into hypothesis. So that you know what you want to optimize.
Centralize: You can have a central repository where you collect all this information and even color code to allocate the level of importance. You can use Google Sheets or Msword Excel
Organize and tag: Organize based on all the teams that will be involved. Tag every member and ensure they follow through with their roles in the optimization process.
Defining prioritization rules:
How do you decide what to test first and what you will test after that? What are you trying to achieve when building your prioritization framework?
First, you identify the drivers of value and effort. This means, how valuable the test is and how much effort is needed to build it. Once you get effort and value right then you’re able to make the right decision with your different ideas.
Prioritization Frameworks
All the frameworks break down value and/or effort into sub-elements. Here are the most common:
1. Value
Reach: How many people will be impacted by your test. For example, if it’s only for returning customers or customers from a specific channel, it might not make much of a difference.
Lift: Reasons to expect a strong reaction. For people who will be part of the test, do you expect to see a dramatic change in behavior?
Strategic fit: Is the idea aligned with strategy? Your optimization program should be the way you want to get to where you want to be. So, an idea that fits into that should be a priority for you.
2. Effort
Design: How many designers and how long will it take to put the design in place (if any).
Engineering: Which developer is going to commit to the project? How much time will be required for implementation?
Coordination: Who is handling this project and how many people will they manage to execute it?
There are different types of prioritization frameworks
PIE Framework
Brian Eisenberg rules
Monetate model
But in this article, I will be highlighting two frameworks fromthe Growth Marketing mini-degree at CXL Institute. The PXL framework by CXL and the Points Model by Hotwire.
PXL Framework
This framework has three benefits:
- It makes any “potential” or “impact” rating more objective.
- It helps to foster a data-informed culture.
- It makes the “ease of implementation” rating more objective.
A good test idea is one that can impact user behavior. So instead of guessing what the impact might be, this framework asks you a set of questions about it:
Is the change above the fold?
This means the changes are noticed by more people which leads to a likelihood of the test having an impact.
Is the change noticeable in under 5 seconds?
If it’s not, then it’s less likely to have an impact.
Does it add or remove anything?
Will significant changes like removing bottlenecks such as reducing the requirements on a form that is causing huge drop-off or adding key information to the landing page.
Does the test run on high traffic pages?
The pages on your website with high performance, will the tests run there? Running tests on high traffic pages means higher conversion rates and in the long run, higher revenue.
The PXL model asks every frontline team member to bring data:
- Is it addressing an issue discovered via user testing?
- Is it addressing an issue discovered via qualitative feedback (polls, surveys, interviews)?
- Is the hypothesis supported by mouse tracking heat maps like Hotjar or eye-tracking?
- Is it addressing insights found via digital analytics?
Hotwire Framework: The Points Model
Hotwire decided to create a systematic, scalable framework that eliminates emotion and personal bias. They broke down each sub-element into specific rules, to remove personal bias.
Value: Define binary rules that are: objective (yes/no), discriminates ideas -something that not all your ideas will have in common, leverage your knowledge through research, analytics, competitors.
This is broken down into three:
Reach: How many people will be impacted?
Lift: Do you expect to see a dramatic change in the behavior of users?
Strategic fit: Is the idea aligned with strategy? Your optimization program should be the way you want to get to where you want to be. So, an idea that fits into that should be a priority for you.
Effort: Define effort rules that: represent your bottlenecks - do your research to see what it will take your test to run and ensure that the requirement is aligned with your company’s existing sizing.
Creative: How much work will you need from your design team?
Development: How much effort from engineering and what is the timeline?
Coordination: This is basically supervision and bringing everyone together to get the test to run.
Points Model Breakdown
For each rule, 1 point is assigned if it will have a significant influence on the product and 0 points if the influence is almost non-existent.
You can read more about the hotwire framework here
Whenever you hear somebody asking your team, “What should we test next?” This is often a clear sign that your optimization process is completely broken. If you have no idea what to test, it’s a symptom of a missing process because optimization is a process.
Creating a framework to make smarter choices and thinking deeply about the key factors that can help your business grow will make your optimization process successful in the long term.
This is my fourth article on my Growth Marketing learning experience at CXL Institute.
