Debriefing Your Website For Higher Returns

Debriefing Your Website For Higher Returns

Lemuel Galpo
Written by Lemuel Galpo
April 20, 2015
Website Speed Optimization

Conversion is the marketing strategy of turning casual visitors or traffic, into paying customers. What good is having a high visitor count if they if they do not contribute to your business? Conversion of a website is usually improved through rigorous testing and implementation of new strategies. But how do we know which test or strategy works best for our website? There are several ways that we can share with you.

In a podcast hosted by Creative Thirst, Bobby Hewitt explained the importance of debriefing a website, implementing a debriefing process, and how debriefing can greatly improve website conversion. Whether your business web page is new, or has been online for many years, you should be doing periodic debriefing as your ultimate preparation for when the rough time comes.

Debriefing Your Website

Debriefing – Definition And Value

What is debriefing and why is it important for website? As defined, debriefing is a onetime semi-structured conversation with an individual, or just experienced stressful or traumatic event. In most cases, the purpose of debriefing is to rescue any possibility of psychological harm by informing people about their experience, or allowing them to talk about it.

[Tweet “With ROI on the tip of everyone’s mind and accountability at an all-time high, debriefing needs to become standard practice at work.”]

Debriefing is very crucial for every website particularly during critical times, and it really needs to take place after each and every individual implementation. Most marketers and website owners disregard the importance of debriefing session because they are focusing on the quick solutions. The ultimate purpose of debriefing is to find the right solutions to every mistake, to learn unto what works, to come up with the best strategy, and to make make the necessary actions and improvement.

Website Debriefing Process

There are many advantages to debriefing. In the very least, it allows website owners to reflect on what had previously been discussed. The same concept applies when it comes to website debriefing. According to Joanne McGovern, Content Team Leader of USA.gov,

Debriefing sessions can help site owners sift through feedback and identify fixes.

Website debriefing might sound overwhelming, but when it is broken down, the process is simply an evaluation of your website from you and your customers’ viewpoint. To get the most out of your website’s debriefing process, get in touch with your team and few participants and make sure to consider these tips;

  1. A debriefing evaluation needs to be part of the design process. Design and marketing is not a full pass or fail system.
  2. We have to work together from proved results. Debriefing is nothing more than evaluating and testing our creative and the results generated from that creative.
  3. In order for a debriefing environment to work, agencies need to partner with clients and clients need to work cooperatively and creatively with their agencies. Both the client and agency need to accept responsibility from improvement and continuous learning.
  4. Take the knowledge that you can learn from your team and participants. What are the problems they’re having with it? What’s working? What’s not? Then use that information in conjunction with the results of your analytics.

You can check McGovern’s webinar – Usability Testing and Debriefing Best Practices, where she showed the step by step process on how a debrief should work.

So the next time a new design or change has been implemented, and you have enough time to gather some statistical results, take a step back, think about forming a debriefing process, get a couple of designers together at least one person from marketing, and if you really want to make it worth your while, get a couple of users in. As always, never forget to conduct a test to check if there are certain improvements that have happened based on your approach. If you want to know more, you can visit us at A/B testing software” href=”https://www.convert.com/” target=”_blank”>Convert.

Originally published April 20, 2015 - Updated April 15, 2019
Lemuel Galpo
As Customer Content Manager, Lem is responsible for bringing learnings in conversion optimization and testing to the world. He is part of Convert.com's growth team and coordinates all writers, editors and illustrators.
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