• Talking to customers – Direct customer contact gives rich insight, even with unfinished designs. The book “Don’t Make Me Think” has a practical approach
• A/B testing – For large websites it’s good practice to A/B test proposed new designs vs. the old one
• Product testing – For web applications there is a strategic question of how to measure progress. Sometimes this can be distilled down to a single metric
• Delegation – Components developed by vendors like Shopify and Squarespace are heavily tested. Using standard conventions makes it easy for customers

• Consumer understanding – Who could be persuaded to buy? What is the “Job to be Done” in terms of what you would like to think?
• Concept and Ad Testing – When customers are shown the concept, do they find it appealing? Is the advertising salient or persuasive?
• Reach – Has the advertising reached the audience?

• Gross Profit ROI – The value of an eCommerce conversion is not the sales price, it’s the gross profit. Use gross profit as the conversion value for your tags so “conversion value / cost” becomes the ROI metric in Google Ads. It’s important to use figures for profit per product which are as accurate as possible
• Short learning cycle – Digital advertising has many permutations. The way to learn is to run short campaigns and quickly get results. Record the settings of each campaign, and only change 1 or 2 things each time
• Google Ads as source of truth – It’s recommended by Google to send conversions to Google Ads (even if you are also sending them to Google Analytics and the accounts are linked). Looking at ROI in Google Ads is more accurate than Google Analytics, and uses the “conversion label” which allows dynamic remarketing
• Flexible attribution models – Google offers a range of attribution models, such as “last click”. It’s possible to compare the results of different models in the “Model comparison” report, and use whichever works best
• Correct tagging setup – See 1-page guide to How tagging works

For businesses with higher price points it makes sense to take a “people first” view. The CRM software becomes the heart of the system, and advertising feeds into that. Options include:

• HubSpot – An integrated solution for managing contacts through the funnel
• Zoho & EngageBay – Lower cost alternatives, targeted at smaller businesses
• Pipedrive – A sales driven CRM, focused on managing a pipeline of deals
• Freshworks – A full small business software suite, which includes CRM

• Pull data into one place – Data can be integrated with tools like Supermetrics or Leadsbridge. These tools support the creation of dashboards, or dashboards can be created in specialist business intelligence tools like Tableau
• Step by step integration – An approach pioneered by Basecamp is to work in cycles. So rather than asking “how long will it take to get everything we want?” ask “what answers can we get in the next 4 weeks?”