How do you approach and prioritize optimizing your web activities? With several existing and new fastgrowing marketing channels most website owners find themselves in a harder and harder struggle to keep up pace with the new possibilities on the web and still keep optimizing their existing activites. You can’t spend the optimal time of attention to all your activities so where to start?

The traditional marketer focus

Most optimizing efforts go into optimizing the different online marketing channels to generate higher conversion like this example.

Optimizing this channel would hopefully generate higher conversions which is great. But could you place your optimizing efforts elsewhere and get a higher effect?

Let’s look at the big picture

If we have a look at the big picture on how the marketing channels typically are connected to your website and conversions you will see that the critical “hub” for your conversions is your website/landingpages and not the marketing channels. The conversion is seldom in the actual marketing creative but the user converts through a landingpage, which can contain multiple holes in the conversion funnel (usability, credibility, signup process etc.). If you would optimize this hub instead of the separate marketing channel the result would be that a lift in conversion would be a lift in conversion for all your marketing channels going through this hub.

These findings suggest that when prioritizing your effort in optimizing your web sphere, focus should be concentrated in optimizing your website or landing pages using for example A/B split testing or more advanced Multi variate testing (MVT). With this example I don’t imply you should not be doing any optimization of your marketing channels. If you don’t have any traffic to your website, optimizing it will have no effect . Our experience tells us however that most weborganizations spend 95% of their time focusing on the external marketing channels and only 5% on content optimization. I would argue that in many cases flipping this priority would increase your overall ROI on your website.