Show notes
Here is roughly how every conversion rate optimization project I take on begins.
We get through introductions, I sketch out an approach, everyone nods politely, and then, usually about forty minutes in, someone leans forward and asks the question. The quick wins question. The "what can we do this quarter" question. The "what's the easy thing we can ship before the board meeting" question.
I always nod sympathetically. I always say yes, of course, there are some quick wins we can target. I always deliver them. And for a long time I told myself I was being responsive to client needs, which is the polite consultant phrase for "I know what they want to buy and I'm cheerfully selling it to them."
But after enough years of this, I've started to notice that the clients who fixate on quick wins don't actually win much. The ones who do best treat quick wins as the opening move and then get on with the actual work.
So, awkwardly, here we are.
A grudging defense of quick wins
I should be careful here, because it would be very easy to read what follows as "quick wins are bad and you should feel bad for wanting them." That isn't quite the argument.
What quick wins actually do well
Early in an engagement, a few well-chosen tests genuinely earn their keep. They build trust with stakeholders who've spent years being told that CRO is a black art performed by people who own too many ergonomic chairs. They prove that experimentation actually moves the numbers, which is how you get budget approval for anything bigger. They drag a team through the discipline of hypothesis, test, learn, iterate, which a surprising number of teams have not actually done before. And they cough up early data you can wave at finance when you eventually ask to look at the difficult stuff.
That is a perfectly reasonable amount of value. The trouble starts when "a few quick wins to get us going" quietly becomes the entire strategy, and we all agree, very politely, to pretend that's fine.
Why we end up here (and yes, that includes me)
Clients call us in too late
There's a timing problem sitting underneath all of this, and it's worth naming first. By the time a company calls someone like me in, the conversion rate has usually been quietly underperforming for a year or more. People will tolerate a slow leak for ages and then panic the moment it becomes a flood. Of course they want quick wins at that point. They want the bleeding to stop, and they want it to stop yesterday.
Which is rational, in its way. But it biases the whole engagement before it's even started. We're not having a calm conversation about long-term value. We're triaging.
Stakeholders are responding to terrible incentives
It's tempting to roll one's eyes at stakeholders for being short-sighted, but honestly, they're not being stupid. The problem is that their incentives are just appalling.
Quarterly bonuses reward this quarter's number. Senior leadership wants to see green arrows every month. Championing a structural fix that takes nine months to land is a career risk in a way that "we lifted click-through by three percent" simply isn't. Small experiments feel politically safe. Big bets feel like the kind of thing that ends up in a LinkedIn post about your unexpected career pivot.
Agencies and consultants are complicit
And while I'm cheerfully pointing fingers, some of them point straight back at me. Agencies and consultants are part of the problem. We are, in fact, a substantial part of the problem.
Our business model rewards short engagements, monthly reports stuffed with reassuring green ticks, and the constant low-grade panic of needing to demonstrate value inside ninety days. We are structurally set up to find things to optimize. We are not structurally set up to walk into a steering committee and say, "Look, your returns process is the actual reason your customers leave. None of us can fix that with a button test. Sorry about that."
The slow, accumulating cost
The trouble with an all-quick-wins strategy is that the damage compounds out of view.
The easy wins run out
For a start, the easy stuff gets used up. Most pages have already had their obvious tests run, so what's left tends to move the needle less and less. Diminishing returns are a real thing in CRO, and I'm always slightly amazed we don't talk about them more, given how much of our work rests on the cheerful assumption that they don't apply to us.
The structural issues never get touched
Meanwhile, the bigger problems never get looked at. Refund policies, product photography, page weight, customer service quality, the post-purchase experience. These are the things that actually move lifetime value, and they sit serenely untouched while we hold a fourth meeting about whether the button should say "Buy now" or "Shop now."
UX debt accumulates quietly
But the cost I find most uncomfortable is the slow accumulation of UX debt. Take any homepage that's been A/B tested for eighteen months and look at what's actually there. Urgency timers. Exit-intent popups. Social proof badges. Micro-copy nudges. A polite little chatbot that won't go away. Each test won in isolation. The cumulative effect is a confused, faintly manipulative mess that erodes the trust we are theoretically there to build.
Nobody owns the whole picture, because nobody's job is the whole picture. Which is, when you think about it, a slightly concerning way to run the customer experience.
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What I'm trying to do instead
I am not suggesting anyone walk into a stakeholder meeting and declare that quick wins are dead. That's a great way to lose friends and influence nobody.
In practice, I've found a few framings work better.
1. Treat quick wins as proof of concepts
A homepage test isn't a strategy. It's a small piece of evidence that experimentation works, which is the foundation for asking to test something harder. Once you have that, you can start asking the bigger questions. Slowly. Politely. Ideally with biscuits.
2. Be honest about the ceiling
Be honest, early and often, about the limited ceiling of small tests. Stakeholders can handle the news that a button-color test won't double revenue. They are grown adults. What they cannot handle, quite reasonably, is being sold a quiet fantasy and then watching it underdeliver in a steering committee six months later.
3. Bank the trust and plan the bigger work
Use the trust that quick wins buy you to map out the bigger projects and actually agree timelines for them. People find it surprisingly easy to commit to a meaningful piece of work three or six months out. The trick is to get the commitment while the goodwill is fresh, not after the quick wins have run dry.
4. Challenge the metrics
This is the hardest one. Take aim at the metrics that produced the quick-win mindset in the first place. Lifetime value, repeat purchase rate, referrals. These are the metrics that reward long-term thinking.
I want to be honest about this one. Lifetime value is easy to name and a complete nightmare to track cleanly. You will need a rough proxy, like a six- or twelve-month value estimate, rather than the perfect formula nobody has ever actually built. The goal isn't perfection. It's getting one metric in the room that points the conversation somewhere other than this quarter.
The honest version
If I'm being really honest about my own work, the engagements I'm proudest of are not the ones where I delivered a thick deck of green-ticked tests. They are the ones where, twelve months in, the client and I sat down and noticed we'd actually changed something structural. The returns flow. The way support tickets feed back into product. The post-purchase experience. The boring, expensive, slow stuff.
None of that came from a quick win. But quick wins bought the trust that bought the room to do the real work, which is, I think, the only honest case for them.
That's the version of CRO I'm trying to do more of. Not quick wins versus big bets. Just quick wins in their proper place, which is at the start of a much longer, much more interesting conversation.