End user journey CRO

I often put together detailed, exciting, long-term CRO plans.  Outlining exciting programmes to website owners of careful performance analysis, comprehensive qualitative research & feedback loops, to feed into split testing plans… only to be told that we just have 3-6 months, and a limited budget, to prove ourselves.

It’s life.  It happens.  Businesses have short-term targets, and we have to adapt and make a short-term impact.

In those situations, it’s best to focus your analysis, research & optimisation on users who’ve reached the end of a journey.  I.e. product pages & conversion processes (like forms & checkouts).

I.e. start here:

Rather than here (home page):

If you’ve got limited time to make a CRO-impact, then you are more likely to get results in the short-term here:

I despise the phrase ‘low hanging fruit’, as sometimes the fruit isn’t hanging that low.  And, it’s not fruit.  It’s conversions.  But you get the idea.

Considerations

The above short-term strategy only works well if:

a)  A decent chunk of traffic is getting to those product pages (either landing there or navigating there).  Check analytics.  I aim for a minimum benchmark of 40% of all traffic, viewing product pages

b)  There are no major UX problems with those middle and early user journey stages.  Ideally, you’d analyse and research these too.  But if you don’t have time, you just have to trust your judgement.  Or do some top-level analysis & user-sanity-checking.