Conversion Optimization in 2011: Agency, In-House or Not Yet

Conversion optimization has become its own line item this year rather than something folded into general marketing or analytics work. With Google phasing out its free Website Optimizer tool in favor of Content Experiments inside Google Analytics, and paid platforms like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer now mature enough to build agencies around, businesses are facing a real decision: is this worth a dedicated budget, or is it still something to handle informally when time allows?

The traffic question comes first

Before anything else, check whether you have enough visitors to make testing worthwhile. A test needs enough traffic flowing through it to reach a result you can trust, and a low-traffic page can take months to get there. If your site gets a modest trickle of visitors, formal testing on individual pages may not be the right investment yet, informal improvements based on user feedback and best practice will get you further, faster.

Signs you’re ready to invest

• You’re spending meaningfully on paid traffic and a conversion rate improvement would visibly move your acquisition cost.
• You have enough monthly visitors to a key page to reach a trustworthy test result within a few weeks, not several months.
• You’ve already fixed the obvious problems, broken forms, confusing navigation, slow pages, and are now looking for smaller, compounding gains.
• Someone on the team has the time and interest to own this as an ongoing responsibility rather than a one-off project.

Signs it’s premature

If your biggest problem is that not enough people are finding you at all, optimization work on the page they eventually land on is solving the wrong end of the problem. Similarly, if your offer or pricing is fundamentally out of step with what the market wants, no amount of button testing fixes that. Get the traffic and the offer right first.

Agency or in-house

This is a live question in 2011 in a way it wasn’t a couple of years ago, now that dedicated conversion agencies exist alongside the self-serve tools. An agency makes sense if you need expertise fast and don’t have anyone internally who’s run tests before. Doing it in-house makes sense once you have enough volume to keep a steady stream of tests running and someone willing to learn the discipline properly; the tools themselves are no longer the barrier either way.

What this costs

The tools have gotten cheap relative to what they were a few years ago, so the real cost here is time: setting up tests correctly, waiting for valid results and turning findings into permanent changes. Underestimating that time commitment is the most common reason conversion optimization efforts stall after an initial burst of enthusiasm.

A reasonable way to decide

If the traffic and spend are there, start with a small, dedicated effort, one page, one clear hypothesis, and measure whether the return justifies expanding it. If the traffic isn’t there yet, put this on a list to revisit once it is, and focus the current budget on growing an audience worth testing on. Either answer is reasonable; the mistake is investing seriously in this before the fundamentals that make it worthwhile are in place.

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Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Analytics guides, see everything we published in 2011 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.