5 Great Ways to Gain Budget and Buy-in for Testing

Often one of the biggest chal­lenges to test­ing and opti­miz­ing your web­site is mak­ing that ini­tial leap and con­vinc­ing senior man­age­ment that you need bud­get and buy-in to do it effec­tively. Unfor­tu­nately, quite often though your plans won’t be met with open arms from your senior exec­u­tives.  And even if you have already begun test­ing, you will quickly real­ize that you need addi­tional bud­get and buy-in so you can obtain bet­ter test­ing tools and more inter­nal resources.

To help you over­come chal­lenges from senior exec­u­tives and obtain more bud­get for your test­ing efforts, here are five great ways you can con­sider try­ing:

1: Use 10% of your SEO/SEM bud­get for a short period

Unfor­tu­nately there is still way too much focus on dri­ving vis­i­tors to web­sites, and too lit­tle focus on engag­ing and con­vert­ing vis­i­tors once they get to web­sites. As a result of this, bud­gets are often sig­nif­i­cantly higher for acquir­ing traf­fic than con­vert­ing traf­fic. You can try and cap­i­tal­ize on this by mak­ing a request to your senior exec­u­tives to share some of this acqui­si­tion online mar­ket­ing bud­get and use it to make a jump start for your web­site opti­miza­tion efforts instead. Tell them all you need is to use just 10% of this acqui­si­tion bud­get for 6 months, and then you will report back on the gains and ROI made from this investment.

This ‘bor­rowed’ money should be invested into set­ting up a good test­ing tool, and into hir­ing some tem­po­rary test­ing help if you don’t have expert inter­nal resources. You could also try request­ing 10% of the SEO/SEM time resources to help you cre­ate, run and analyse tests too.

After this six month period has ended, you should have hope­fully gained some good results that you can use to help you gain buy-in and a bud­get solely for test­ing and opti­miz­ing your website.

2: Show proof that your com­peti­tors are testing

A sim­ple yet effec­tive way of try­ing to gain more buy-in and bud­get is to obtain test­ing case stud­ies that show your com­peti­tors (or web­sites in your indus­try) are also doing test­ing and hav­ing good results with it. These test­ing case stud­ies can be found by look­ing on web­sites like www​.abtests​.com and www​.mar​keting​ex​per​i​ments​.com. You can also find some great test­ing case stud­ies on the Adobe Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing web­site. Once you have found some rel­e­vant ones you can present these to your senior exec­u­tives to try and con­vince them of the need for bud­get — they will often want to keep up with their com­peti­tors are doing, so this should help.

3: Give a pre­sen­ta­tion to your senior execs show­ing poten­tial of test­ing on your website

Don’t just tell your senior exec­u­tives that you need to test and that you need a bud­get. Give them solid rea­sons why. A good way to do this is by review­ing your web­site to find key areas that need improv­ing, and then cre­ate a pre­sen­ta­tion for your senior exec­u­tives show­ing them your find­ings. This should include screen­shots of prob­lem­atic pages and also key insights from your ana­lyt­ics tool reveal­ing pages and flows with high exit rates. In this report you should always men­tion the likely impact on rev­enue (and not just con­ver­sion rate lifts) as this will res­onate bet­ter with this senior level audience.

To increase the chances of this pre­sen­ta­tion being effec­tive, you should con­sider get­ting a third party con­sul­tant to help review your web­site and come up with test ideas. This is because you may find that your senior exec­u­tives are more likely to lis­ten to some­one exter­nal like this rather than an inter­nal person.

4: Find an opti­miza­tion exec­u­tive spon­sor to help

Find­ing and using a test­ing exec­u­tive spon­sor will help you gain more buy-in and bud­get for test­ing. This per­son will help cham­pion the ben­e­fits and rea­son­ing for test­ing at a senior level and help you obtain bud­get and fur­ther buy-in. You will find it much harder to obtain bud­get and buy-in with­out some­one like this on same level as your senior exec­u­tives. Hav­ing this exec­u­tive spon­sor will also help you improve your abil­ity to get tests pri­or­i­tized and launched at a senior level. An ideal can­di­date to play this small but impor­tant role would be some­one senior from the mar­ket­ing or IT depart­ment, and some­one that is well respected by the senior executives.

5: Go ‘under the radar’ to do a test (risky)

If you are new to test­ing and are really strug­gling to gain buy-in and bud­get to obtain a good tool and start test­ing, as a last ditch attempt you should con­sider ‘going under the radar’ to cre­ate a few tests. These unof­fi­cial tests will then hope­fully get you some good results that you can then present to your senior exec­u­tives as proof of ROI.

This involves set­ting up tests qui­etly by draw­ing as lit­tle atten­tion to them as pos­si­ble from senior exec­u­tives. To help you do this, you will need to find a sym­pa­thetic web devel­oper who under­stands the ben­e­fits of test­ing and can devote some time to your efforts.  And if you don’t cur­rently have a test­ing tool to use, you can use a cheap or free test­ing tool. Then once you have ran some sim­ple tests and proved ROI to your exec­u­tives, you can request higher bud­get level to use a tool like Test&Target and more resources.  Bear in mind this method is risky, so you should ensure you pick some­thing to test with low poten­tial neg­a­tive impact, and to do this as a last ditch attempt if all else fails.

Remem­ber that you also need more than just a test­ing tool, so when request­ing bud­get, you should try and allo­cate bud­get for at least one ded­i­cated test­ing resource.