This is the sixth posting in a series aimed at helping you as a Marketer evaluate conversion optimization services providers so you make the best possible decision of who to hire. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here and Part 5 here.

Q6: “What is expected from my team?”

When you hire a conversion optimization services provider, you must start off with a clear understanding of what will be expected from you and your team. If you don’t have this clear understanding, 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.

Understanding what the deliverables are from your conversion optimization services provider is closely related to them having a unique, repeatable and scalable methodology for optimization (already covered on an earlier post).

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

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

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

Here is the list:

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, MVT, etc)
• Development of experiment Hypotheses
• Test design

Experiment Execution
• 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

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 don’t have the internal resources available, your will want the conversion optimization services provider you select to be able to deliver as many of the required services as possible.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the question “What are some of the risks involved in an optimization project?” Make sure you get it by joining the email list below (you can always unsubscribe later).

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 9:10 pm and is filed under how to. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.