# Case Study: Growing Revenue, Falling Conversion, and Forty-One Ideas With No Order to Do Them In | Crank Source: https://wearecrank.com/case-studies/outdoor-clothing-audit-prioritisation-2017 Revenue was rising 4% while conversion fell 17.5%, and a weighted scorecard turned a long list of possible fixes into a ranked plan, without letting the cheapest ideas win by default. --- ![Outdoor clothing case study: Growing Revenue, Falling Conversion, and Forty-One Ideas With No Order to Do Them In](/placeholder.svg?dpl=dpl_DzKS3KHkqdwxj68CH4uXeN4PoDZ6) Outdoor Clothing, 2017 Audit and Prioritisation # Growing Revenue, Falling Conversion, and Forty-One Ideas With No Order to Do Them In Revenue was rising 4% while conversion fell 17.5%, and a weighted scorecard turned a long list of possible fixes into a ranked plan, without letting the cheapest ideas win by default. Challenge A well-established outdoor clothing retailer held a long list of possible improvements and no agreed basis for deciding which to do first, while revenue rose 4 per cent year on year on flat traffic, conversion fell 17.5 per cent, from 0.99 to 0.82 per cent, and cost per acquisition rose 37 per cent to £30\. All the growth came from revenue per visitor rising 26 per cent, existing customers spending more, not more people buying, which is a position that runs out. Mobile had overtaken desktop on traffic share for the first time while converting at roughly half the rate, and branded paid search had overtaken organic for the first time too, raising a question the data couldn't settle: whether paid was winning traffic organic would have had anyway. Measurement was partial throughout, add-to-cart, product view and checkout events missing, a quarter of social traffic carrying no campaign information, and sixteen transactions recorded with zero revenue, so nobody could tell whether the conversion fall was a merchandising problem or a checkout one. Approach Take the findings into a weighted prioritisation across the whole customer journey, 41 initiatives from discovery through to post-purchase, each scored on five criteria: business benefit, customer impact, technical readiness, cost and time to deliver. Weight business benefit and customer impact for two-thirds of the total score between them, and express benefit in revenue bands rather than adjectives, so an initiative worth over £600,000 can't be outranked by a cheap one worth a fraction as much. Outcome The business had a ranked plan rather than a list of observations, with an owner and a next step against each item. The three highest-priority initiatives carried over £1.37 million of identified opportunity between them, at the lowest edge of the scorecard's own benefit bands, opportunity identified by the scoring, not revenue delivered or recovered. Whether those initiatives were actually built is not confirmed here. 01 ## Growth that was earning more from the same people Revenue rose 4 per cent year on year on flat traffic, but conversion fell 17.5 per cent, from 0.99 to 0.82 per cent, all the growth came from revenue per visitor rising 26 per cent. That's existing customers spending more, not more people buying, and it's a position that runs out. Cost per acquisition rose 37 per cent to £30 over the same period. 02 ## A traffic mix moving against the business Mobile overtook desktop on traffic share for the first time while converting at roughly half the rate, so the fastest-growing device was also the worst-converting one, the traffic mix moving against the business month by month. Branded paid search overtook organic for the first time too, raising a question the data couldn't settle: whether paid was winning traffic organic would have won anyway. That question is raised here, not resolved. 03 ## Measurement too thin to tell merchandising from checkout Add-to-cart, product view and checkout events were all missing, a quarter of social traffic carried no campaign information, and sixteen transactions were recorded with zero revenue. With checkout events missing specifically, nobody could tell whether the conversion fall was a merchandising problem, the wrong products, badly presented, or a checkout problem, people ready to buy and failing at the till. The two require completely different fixes, and the data couldn't distinguish them. 04 ## Forty-one ideas, weighted rather than guessed The findings went into a weighted prioritisation across the whole customer journey, 41 initiatives from discovery through to post-purchase, each scored on five criteria: business benefit, customer impact, technical readiness, cost and time to deliver. Business benefit and customer impact carried two-thirds of the total weight between them, and benefit was expressed in revenue bands rather than adjectives, so a genuinely valuable initiative couldn't be outranked by a cheap one worth a fraction as much. The weighting did real work: the second-ranked initiative needed nine months and new development and still beat faster, cheaper items, because its benefit band was the highest available, under a ranking driven purely by ease of delivery, it would have lost to something worth a fraction as much. 05 ## What the ranking produced The business ended with a ranked plan rather than a list of observations, with an owner and a next step against each item. The three highest-priority initiatives, stock visibility, an on-site events calendar, and product recommendations, carried over £1.37 million of identified opportunity between them, each valued at the lowest edge of the scorecard's own benefit bands, two of them in the top band worth more than £600,000 each on their own. That figure is opportunity identified by the scoring exercise, not revenue delivered or recovered, and whether the three initiatives were actually built isn't confirmed here. 06 ## What this means for you Revenue rising while conversion falls means you are earning more from the same people rather than winning new ones, and that runs out. And when you decide what to fix, weight the value of the outcome above the ease of doing it, otherwise you will spend a year on cheap things. ## What a weighted scorecard changed about a long list of good ideas \-17.5% Conversion rate, even as revenue rose 4% on flat traffic +37% to £30 Cost per acquisition, year on year 41 Initiatives scored across the whole customer journey, from discovery to post-purchase £1.37m identified Opportunity across the three highest-priority initiatives, identified, not delivered Drawn from Crank's account audit and prioritisation work conducted in 2017 for this outdoor clothing retailer. The £1.37 million figure reflects identified opportunity from the prioritisation scorecard, not revenue delivered or recovered. Client not named. ## Want to know what this looks like in your own account? These findings came from asking straightforward questions before any budget moved. We're happy to do the same for yours. [ Talk to Wearecrank](https://wa.me/447457416922?text=Help%20my%20business)[Get in touch](/contact) [← Back to all case studies](/case-studies)