Building a Culture of Optimization: Planning (Part 1)

December 9, 2014

Whether you have been testing for years or you are just getting started, building a successful optimization program depends on careful planning, implementation, and measurement.

This is the first in a three-part series of articles that looks at the steps involved in creating a successful optimization program. In it, we’ll look at three critical elements in optimization planning:

  1. Forming a great testing team
  2. Getting your stakeholders on board
  3. Writing a formal test plan

Forming a Great Testing Team

In Web analytics, one good analyst can provide great insights, but not so in testing. The testing process is typically too political and requires too many resources to be executed by just one person.

Consider what is often involved in making a change to a website:

  • Someone decides that a change is warranted.
  • Management needs to review the change request.
  • If the changed is approved, management initiates the change management process.
  • Depending on the change, developers, designers, marketers, and copywriters may be required.
  • Information Technology needs to deploy the change.
  • Quality Assurance needs to test the change.
  • Analytics needs to validate the change.

Now, compare that to a situation where a testing program is already in place. Instead of someone deciding a change needs to be made, marketers regularly ask themselves, “What would happen if we changed X, Y, or Z, or even all of them?” And although the best testing solutions help to minimize the need for some of the resources required—most commonly developers and IT—there is still a need for a cohesive group to create and run tests and analyze their results.

This article originally appeared in the January 2013 issue of MarketingProfs. You can read the original version here.