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The triage method that prioritizes revenue, not opinions
How to triage your funnel like an ER team and stop wasting tests on low-impact ideas.
Brian Schmitt
November 30, 2025
The CRO Triage Method
Let’s be honest:
Most A/B testing roadmaps are just wishlists.
Someone says, “we should test a new headline.”
Someone else wants a layout variation.
Leadership throws in a homepage hero idea.
And suddenly you’re stuck deciding between:
A) What sounds cool
B) What’s easy to launch
C) What the HIPPO said last
None of those are good reasons to run a test.
The question shouldn’t be “What can we test?”
It should be: “What’s broken, and worth fixing?”
That’s what CRO triage is about.
The Fix-What-Matters Framework
Triage, like in an emergency room, prioritizes urgency + impact, not noise.
Here’s how we triage conversion issues:
Revenue Relevance:
Is this page or flow responsible for a meaningful chunk of revenue?
Friction Visibility:
Are users getting stuck here? Is there real behavioral or VOC (Voice of Customer) evidence?
Fixability:
Can we resolve the friction with a focused test in a single sprint?
When something scores high on all three, it moves to the top of the list.
No more guesswork.
No more Chia-Pet tests. (Sorry, I was 8 when that catchy jingle came out. It’s forever burned into my brain.)
Just methodical focus on what moves revenue.
Win of the Week:
Problem:
On the product listing page (PLP), clicking a color swatch simply swapped the product image. It didn’t take the user deeper into the experience or give them the information they needed to commit.
Discovery:
Session data showed high swatch interaction, but relatively low PDP views and add-to-carts. The behavior suggested interest—but the interface created dead ends.
Hypothesis:
If swatch clicks brought users directly to the product detail page (PDP) with the selected color pre-loaded, shoppers would engage more deeply and convert at higher rates.
Test:
The PLP was updated so that clicking any color swatch sent users to the PDP of that product, with the clicked color already selected.
Results:
+2.4% lift in cart adds
+2.3% lift in PDP views
+3.1% lift in transactions
→ +591 additional cart adds/month = 7,092 cart adds/year
If you extrapolate the $225 AOV for this brand, it would add up to an additional $1.6M annually.
Lesson:
What looks like a cosmetic UI tweak can have a meaningful revenue impact.
Swatch clicks showed intent. The friction was in how that intent dead-ended.
By respecting the user’s signal and giving them momentum, the brand turned micro-engagement into macro impact.
How to Do a CRO Triage This Week
Pick one high-traffic flow. Maybe your top PDP or add-to-cart flow?
Then:
✅ Map the journey:
Start with homepage → collection → PDP → cart → checkout. What’s the top path?
✅ Pull the data:
Where’s dropoff highest? Where are time-on-page or exits suspiciously high?
✅ Watch the replays:
Where do users hesitate, scroll-stall, rage-click, loop back?
✅ Overlay qualitative input:
Use a Revenue Friction Roadmap or survey insights to validate friction.
✅ Score it:
If it’s high-revenue, high-friction, and easy(ish) to test, it’s worth doing now.
This turns your backlog into a battlefield plan.
Avoid These Common Pitfalls
❌ Don’t start with what’s easiest.
Start with what’s most costly to leave unfixed.
❌ Don’t test just because you can.
Test because there’s evidence of pain.
❌ Don’t fix the homepage while PDPs bleed revenue.
Focus where the purchase decision happens first.
Quote of the week:
“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”
A sharp reminder that most “good ideas” aren’t worth testing.
The ones that are? They’re buried inside the data you’ve been ignoring.
Looking forward,
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P.S. Ready to grow revenue without having to grow traffic? Let’s talk.