That’s correct. Once a website is completed, the website is completed. That’s how most companies think….. WRONG!

The Olympic motto is Citius (swifter), Altius (higher), Fortius (stronger). I’d add Smartius.

Hence, in the Age of Speed, it boils down to how smart you are when you apply the three qualities of a JET… aligned, agile and aerodynamic. For more info on that… http://www.ageofspeed.com

GREAT blog. Love it.

Quality Assurance: QA Departments are often averse to speed. At more than one company, I have seen testing and speed of changes going through get the blame for a defect rolling out to production.

Budget process: When competing for resources, 20 projects come to the prioritization table to see which 4 will get done in the next quarter. And the one with a concrete business case showing a 40% return always beats the one that says “we are not sure exactly what the site needs to look like, we just believe that we can increase conversion if we try some things like this.” With no approved budget to bill to, forget testing.

Code base complexity: When working in an environment where there are large quarterly or monthly projects being worked at all times, the coders and configuration managers don’t like small changes starting and completing before the large ones have had a chance to release. It can make it more difficult to keep track of which code line is current and what branch should get applied where. Eventually, this leads to problem number 1 I noted where qa blames the changes on the optimization speed.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a believer and I know first-hand that there is a solution for each of these, but I wanted to add to your list if helpful.

SEO is an essential and vital route to improving usability and search engine visibility of web sites. So with what appears to be a disproportionate amount of time and money being allocated to this fine discipline, it made me wonder how much was being …

there’s so much to say about this I can’t type fast enough, there’s not enough space here, and there’s probably another book in this for you.

Anyhow, this type of attitude is not peculiar to the online world. I’ve had many “vigorous debates” with fellow marketing managers over the years along the lines of Me: “Why are you still running that campaign when you know it doesn’t work?” Them: “I have to be seen to be doing something.”

Me: “But you’re losing money!” Them: “It’s better than doing nothing.” Me: “How is losing money better?” [Awkward silence, strange glare, exit stage right.]

This often called “hope, “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Or, as another marketing colleague put it: “They’re confusing activity with productivity.”

I’ve heard that refrain: “I have to be seen to be doing something” so many times I can’t tell you.

“Hope” seems to be a terminal condition in many people and organisations.

As Drayton Bird keeps pointing out, the techniques for successful advertising and marketing were worked out centuries ago, yet people still consistently refuse to do what works.

What to do?

Around 5% stated they spend over £200K annually however almost a third of surveyed companies are spending less than £5,000 (five thousand) on web analytics – and this is on staff, consultancy, technology and services…

It would be interesting to know how much they spend on advertising, just to put these numbers into the context. Does anyone have any data about it – web analytics investment as a % of overall marketing spend?

If we did we might not have to keep creating new sites and partnerships because we are getting more revenue out of the ones we have. We are definitely setting up a lot more tests than ever but the hardest part is still getting the time and resources dedicated to it.

Thanks for the good article (again).

Because the industry is just moving into the discipline of website/conversion optimization, many practitioners are sticking with the safe bet of ’spend a dollar on keywords, hopefully get more than a dollar back in ROI’.

Like one of the salespeople at Sitebrand says on the issue “No one ever gets fired for buying IBM”.

It is becoming increasingly apparent however that the concept of treating your website as a source for ongoing analysis and optimization is gaining speed quickly. Based on the growing amount of online dialog (and the fact that Always Be Testing is the #1 book on eCommerce on Amazon right now), website optimization will be gaining some significant traction in the new year.

Thank you so much for everything you publish. Really helpful.

People pay and pay for AdWords, so they want to get as much out of it as they can.

My trick is, put a $ amount on organic traffic.

Just look at the number of visitors that land on a page from organic searching. If you average $2 a click for AdWords, you can use that to tell people how much the organic traffic is worth.

Now you have to optimize that page, just like an AdWords landing page, so you are not wasting all that “expensive” traffic.

Ha ha. But true….

There are often less than a handful of people working full time on the site, even if it’s doing something like 50-100,000 page views per day and turning over good money.

Increasing the PPC spend is one of the simplest things for organisations like this to do. The management of the program will probably be handled by an external agency. All the site has to do is find the money and sign the cheque.

Finding the money is never easy, but the agency will take care of the analytics and provide nice plain ROI figures. The money will come out of advertising budgets and is closely linked to sales, so it’s relatively easy to get the increase in each round. And the results are almost instant, all being well.

No wonder that’s where the money goes.

Everything else is much more difficult both to manage and to get the budget. M/v testing ought to be the number one thing to do, but it involves making changes to the content or structure of the site (even if the technology for testing is free) and getting the budget for that is a whole different ball game. It’s not seen as an ongoing advertising cost. It’s not seen as directly related to sales. It’s a struggle.

Clickstream analysis? That comes very low on the list. It’s all ‘rear view mirror’ stuff. It takes time to build up the data, even more time to analyse it (nobody has time) — and then what? More changes to the site, which come out of which budget?

It’s extremely hard for these teams to make progress. They know that money is being left on the table. But without a fundamental change at the highest levels of the company, and within finance in particular, it’s very hard to take action.

This is where that other famous rule comes into play: if you can’t take action, there’s no point in doing the analysis.

I find the hardest part (which hinders speed) is getting the resources to get the tests up and results rolled out due to other company agendas that these departments (developers,designers etc.) are working on that are in many cases just as important in their own right. Sometimes this takes away from what we can test (or how in-depth or advanced the tests can be) because we have to consider time restraints and resources available and what ultimately will get completed.

Thank you for your comments. I know you know a lot about speed being a former Olympian and of course writing about it in your last best selling book.

Isn’t this the same type of optimization athletes go through to get that edge over their last efforts? It’s this process of continuous improvement to our health that all of us who are not Olympians need to take to eat a bit healthier, exercise, etc. It is not about fast radical change but small incremental ones. Right?