How to Prioritise your CRO Tests

After you’ve tried some of our conversion rate optimisation tips on your own website, hopefully you’ve moved on to applying our 3-step CRO process. If so, it’s likely you’ve now got a long list of hypotheses for A/B tests you would like to run. But where do you go next?

Introducing the Impact Effort Matrix

An impact effort matrix is a simple but powerful decision-making tool. It allows you to prioritise tasks based on their potential impact and the amount of effort required to implement them.

It’s worth noting the use of the word “potential” here. An impact effort matrix can’t predict the future, but it is an effective tool to focus your mind and communicate your priorities to stakeholders.

We like to start our prioritisation by creating a backlog, and this can be as simple as a spreadsheet of your tests. Once that’s done, you add a score of 1-5 for how impactful you think each test is likely to be, and how much effort it will take to deliver.

If you have multiple people working on your CRO programme, who can even begin assigning owners against the different tests.

At this stage, it may be worth considering stakeholder engagement. If you have vocal stakeholders you may decide to let them also prioritise the tests and then average the scores.

Using the Impact Effort Matrix

Once you’ve scored your tests, it’s time to plot them on the matrix.

We use the fantastic Miro for this. They have dozens of templates to aid productivity and Miro’s Impact Effort Matrix template is one we often use to prioritise tasks.

The matrix is split into four quadrants:

• Quick Wins - these tasks are low effort and high impact. You should implement these first.
• Major Projects - these tasks will take a significant amount of time, but are likely to be hugely beneficial to your customers and business.
• Fill-Ins - these tasks are easy to implement but low impact.
• Thankless Tasks - these will waste your time and are unlikely to deliver any real benefits. You should avoid these tasks.

Using these quadrants, you can easily visualise your backlog.

You now have a simple tool to help you communicate where you will be focussing your effort over the coming weeks and months, and reduce the likelihood of your CRO programme being derailed further down the line.

But - equally importantly - behind the scenes of your impact effort matrix is a set of hypotheses steeped in customer insight and research which will help you deliver an effective conversion rate optimisation programme.

Continue learning
The 3 step process to build an A/B test

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