One of the questions we get asked very often by prospective clients relates to what types of services they can expect from us when it comes to testing. While my standard answer is “we do the work; you get the glory,” it probably doesn’t really explain much – especially when these prospective clients are shopping for a testing services vendor.

Being very clear in understanding the services you will get from a conversion optimization services provider is crucial because, if you don’t have this absolutely clear, you may be in for a nasty surprise in terms of the total cost of engaging with them – and it might be too late to pull out.

So in this blog post I hope to provide you with guidance when considering hiring a Conversion Optimization services provider in terms of what you should be looking for.

Does your company deliver…? Yes or No

There is a fairly long list of tasks and services normally associated with conversion optimization. The list below represents the questions you should ask of the potential conversion optimization services provider (as in, “Does your company deliver…?”)

The conversion optimization services provider you select needs to identify up front what they will deliver vs. what will be expected of you and your team.

There are no wrong answers – but you must remember that, for any of the tasks and services they do not provide, you and your team will be expected to!

For each item where the answer is No, you should budget for additional amounts (and, to be honest, you should also question why they don’t provide these basic requirements to proper and thorough conversion optimization services).

Here is the conversion optimization services checklist:

Planning

• Alignment of your business goal online with experimentation objectives
• Web analytics research to inform the opportunities for optimization
• Competitive review
• The assessment of your technical environment to ensure compatibility with testing technology
• Testing technology recommendations
• Categorization of segments and traffic sources
• Traffic sources & volumes
• Post-conversion sales analysis
• Identification of the specific conversion funnel step objectives
• Identification and prioritization of all your conversion funnel experiment opportunities
• Conversion Optimization strategy (A/B/n, MVT, etc)
• Development of experiment Hypotheses
• Test design

Experiment Execution – for multiple test Variations

• Wireframes
• Layouts
• Graphic design
• Copy and content
• Mockups
• Variable content box placement
• All HTML and images

Technical installation

• Testing tool
• Variable content box code
• Experiment Combinations fully tested before launch

Results Analysis

• Periodic client updates
• Hard coding of winning variation
• Recommendations for future action

In summary, then, it is key to have roles and responsibilities well defined prior to the start of the conversion optimization project.

If you have internal staff not fully utilized and experienced in running online experiments, then the list above does not need to be fully supported by the conversion optimization services provider you select.

However, if time is of the essence and you do not have the internal resources available, you will want the conversion optimization services provider you select to be able to deliver as many of the required services as possible.

(Not coincidentally, we at WiderFunnel deliver all the services listed above because, you see, “we do the work; you get the glory”)