In the world of business, it is essential that you have a varied and diverse marketing strategy if you are going to succeed as a market leader. This means having a system in place that allows assessing the best marketing techniques, how effective they, and the best ways of applying them en masse to your website for the best possible optimization.

This means you have to carry out regular testing in order to ensure you know which variations of tactics are the most effective. You don’t want to waste time and resources focusing on elements of your business that don’t work so well, and this is where testing comes in. One way of achieving this is to use the P.I.E. prioritization framework, first devised by Chris Goward.

Knowing where to test first is key to higher conversion rates, lower cost per acquisitions, and more complete customer experiences. This is why it is so important to carry out the right tests, but you can’t test everything at once as that’s not possible in most cases. Prioritizing is a key part of your optimization process, so emphasizing pages that are the most important to the growth your website is standard. Think about the 80/20 rule, we want to spend our efforts which are going to drive 80% of the results.

Three Criteria to Prioritize Pages

When you are approaching improving your lead gen pages or product pages, there are three things you need to consider that will make life so much easier. The P.I.E. framework has three essential criteria that we’ll need to cover first, and these are the three points you use to figure out which pages should be tested first, and in which order: Potential, Importance, Ease.

Potential of P.I.E.

With potential, you’re essentially looking at the scope for improvement for the page. How great is the existing page, and what you can do to make it better, and how much better can it convert? For instance, you may have a lead generation page that’s killing it across some legacy Facebook ads, and you notice some easy no-brainer fixes or tweaks which would very likely improve conversion rates. Prioritize your best and worst performers, and make sure you take into account customer data, web analytics, and expert analysis.

Importance of P.I.E.

When gauging importance, we want to consider how valuable the traffic is to this page or if this page is affecting our business in an incremental negative or positive way. This very well may turn into a discussion as to what you and your business consider high in importance. We recommend looking at which pages are driving the highest amount of revenue and work backwards from there.

Ease of P.I.E.

Ease is also a crucial part of the process, and it’s important to think about how difficult it will be to implement a test on a particular web page or template. You should also consider things like the technical difficulty involved in running these particular tests moving forward. The need to completely redesign your landing pages and work up new copy will be considered less “ease” than simply testing headlines or sub-headlines on a landing page.

The idea is to get to a stage where you can invest minimal time and resources, with maximum reward. We find it works best to think about how to make the site as technically easy to use (and test) as possible, while also thinking about the different “political” elements of your homepage. The P.I.E. framework is a great starting place when considering improving your conversion rates and optimizing the web pages that drive traffic to your site.