Live From SMX Seattle: Conversion Optimization – Winning After They Arrive

Moderator:

Jeffrey Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

Scott Brinker, President and CTO of Ion Interactive

Robert Bergquist, CEO of Widemile

Tom Leung, Business Product Manager at Google

Jonathon Mendez, Founder and CEO of RAMP Digital

Tom Leung talked about creating a great ad and beautiful landing pages.

• Ad Creative: 0-3 seconds, 3% of pixels, no commitment
• Landing Pages – 0-20 Seconds, 100% of pixels, committed
• Closing Pages: 2-3 Minutes, 100% of pixels, significant commitment

He gave this funny acronym, HiPPO – Highest Paid Person in the Organization Decides. With testing you will have evidence as to which test was more effective, compared to your executives going with what they assume is right.

He shows a step by step process on how to use Google’s Website Optimizer. He then showed actual Google tests they ran with the optimizer.

• Gmail – increased sign up rate by 30%
• Picasa – increased downloads by 30%

*He makes a key point in regards to testing. Testing is not only there to improve your conversion, it’s there to make sure you don’t kill your conversion rate by assuming that it will work.

Tom went into what resources you will need to perform these A/B and Multivariate tests.

• Designer: To design the different layout, buttons, headlines, images, etc…
• Manager: To communicate with the client on their goals and objectives from the tests.
• Developer: To implement the actual changes on the site.

A key point during testing is you must have a commitment from everyone as well as the leadership from your marketing department. “I will not spend more money on a site, if I do not know if it converts properly”

He announced the Website Optimizer, Website Workout. Learn more about the website workout contest by Google.

Scott Brinker started off by stating that all clicks are not created equal.

He brought up the concept of trying to move away from the traditional landing page (headline, description, form). We need to move to a Landing Page 2.0 concept. He goes on to explain what Landing Page 2.0 is.

• More than a page
• Creative Experience design
• Rich media (flash, video, avatars)
• Interactive widgets, applications
• Social media interfaces
• Mobile Optimization

His next point was, 3 different ways to scale:

• Test Scaling
  
  • Increase the number of alternate page elements and layouts being tested
  • A/B vs Multivariate techniques
  • However to the outside world, the user only sees one page
• Horizontal Scaling
  
  • Increase the number of distinct landing page “destinations”
  • Long tail ads mapped to long tail landing pages
  • Landing page ratio (LPR) metric
  • Optimizing by tighter message
• Vertical Scaling
  
  • Increase the number of pages in a specific landing destination
  • Micro-sites and conversion paths
  • Evolve beyond POLP (plain old landing pages)
  • Behavioral Optimization

Things to think about when develop landing pages.

• Directed behavioral segmentation
  • Segment by geography, industry, pain point, identity, role, desire, purchase stage, knowledge
• The most important aspect is Audience Segmentation. Identify who these visitors are.
  • Find out who your ideal customer is and then run some test

Jonathon Mendez started off by talking about how user controlled applications like search, do so well. The reason is that it gives the user control of what they are looking for. The key is to give users the ability to define their experience

He showed a diagram, where he flipped the sales funnel. He said that we should start to think of marketing in these terms.

• Content (location)
• Context (relevant)
• Intelligence (content)
• Tools (search)

Robert Bergquist:

• 87% not satisfied with their testing
• 60% doing no testing or optimization of any kind

He talked about 3 things you need to do to optimize your website

• Analyze your audience and its needs – make as many assumptions as you would like so you can test those assumptions
• Embrace marketing and design best practices
• Test everything – all your assumptions

Related blog posts on this session:

Conversion Optimization: Winning After They Arriveby Scott Brinker

SMX: Amazin’ Conversion Optimization by David Utter