Is Your Website Optimized?

I’ve been wondering why more businesses don’t optimize their websites.  It’s baffling. 

Opimization is the only way to make sure that you get as high a yield from your site as possible.  Whether your site is for ecommerce, lead generation or branding and awareness, you’re missing conversions if you don’t optimize.  It seems like only a third of sites are optimized today (Warning!  This number may not be statistically correct!  It’s the result of Susan Kearney’s walk around and ask survey, not real research).

What is website optimization?  It’s the process of continually tweaking components of your site to find out which version gets the best response from visitors using A/B testing.  Does the blue button convert more customers than red button?  Do you get more registrations if the form has 3 fields to fill out versus 5?  Should your survey go on the top left or right of the page?  Every component of  design and layout, content and navigation should be tested.   An optimized website can double, triple, even quadruple your conversions - or more. 

At any rate, I decided to find out why most folks aren’t doing this, so over the past few months I have asked dozens of colleagues.  Here’s what I learned.  By and large, marketers who were NOT optimizing their sites were dependent on IT resources for web development.  IT resources that were busy doing ‘real work’ rather than making lots of website changes ‘at the whim’ of the marketing department.  Marketers who had successful optimization programs?  Their web resources were WITHIN the marketing department and available.

So I have a new question.  Why don’t more marketing departments have web resources?  I’d love to hear what you think.