Last year, Conversion Sciences and I teamed up to prove that Austin, Texas, is the Conversion Capital of the World.
While some may disagree, evidence still points to this unique claim to fame for the capital city of Texas.
For those who aren’t sure where Austin is, we’re providing a map.
Conversion Optimization Experts and Austin: Weirdly Connected
At first glance, conversion optimizers can seem like an elite group. Even for marketers who know they should be testing, the practice of hypothesizing and measuring feels like it should be reserved for brainy number-nerds.
But if you look closely, there’s an incredible diversity among conversion experts.
True, some of them were doing advanced calculations before most of us could count, but many got their start in unlikely places: advertising, SEO and even the golf course.
What’s most interesting is that they seem to be drawn to this one location: a cluster of entrepreneurial, music-loving, taco-eating, results-oriented marketers.
Noah Kagan, a transplant from the Silicon Valley explains the phenomenon in this TechCrunch video. He says people come to visit and realize, “Wow! This is a great culture: good lifestyle, affordable, the people are friendly… .”
That explains why they’re drawn here, but one of the reasons they stay (and flourish) is the very thing that makes Austin unique.
The city’s tag line is “Keep Austin weird.” Its hallmark: diversity. This is a place that rewards creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. So it’s the perfect place for smart people to make their mark and still enjoy life.
“In Austin, we wanna have lives,” says Noah. And apparently, a lot of smart conversion optimizers would echo that sentiment.
Like it or not, agree or not, Austin has become prime real estate for conversion rate optimizers. Last year, we asked local experts “why Austin?” This year, we decided to get a little more personal.
- What is your origin story?
- What made you finally decide that data-driven marketing was important?
- How did Austin play into that?”
Here’s what they told us.
Brian Massey
I was trained as a computer scientist, and wound my way through sales and into marketing. Through this journey, data-driven marketing came pretty naturally to me. I was a marketer with a scientist’s training. I wasn’t going to settle for guessing about what worked on the Web.
In 2001 I wrote my own analytics package, which I think you can still find on SourceForge.net. However, my employers didn’t really know what to make of the marketing guy who was spending his time coding. At the time, there wasn’t a word or a discipline or an industry for what I was doing. I had a hard time describing the method to my madness.
It was a “Wizards of the Web” seminar by Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg (see below) that sealed it for me. They showed me how science and marketing could work as one.
Conversion optimization brought my talents and neuroses together.
In 2007, I started Conversion Sciences and began teaching the world about this new set of disciplines. Many businesses get it now, and we have been having a lot of fun understanding crazy people they call their visitors.
How does Austin play into this? Aside from the unusual business school, the Wizard Academy here, Austin has the “Creative Class” we need to make websites awesome. When you combine low cost of living with high-value talent, it’s a great place to run a conversion optimization company.
Joel Harvey
My first experience with using data to make money came when I was ten years old.
I started collecting sports cards and fell in love with both the statistics and the potential to make money
by understanding the relationship of those statistics and the market value of a particular player or card and leveraging that knowledge in trade negotiations with other collectors.
There was nothing more thrilling than using insights from data to engage in a profitable trade. By the time I lost interest in sports cards (about three years later), I had turned several hundred dollars into a collection worth several thousand dollars.
I was hooked.
A handful of years later I started building and monetizing websites. This was before Google Website Optimizer or any early A/B testing tools, but I knew that in order to maximize profits, I would need to try different types of content.
Essentially that meant running pre/post tests and keeping a sharp eye on the bottom line to see if it was moving in the right direction. I quickly realized how powerful (and profitable) even small changes to a page could be and have been hooked on optimization ever since.
How Austin plays into this: About eight years ago my digital marketing career was really starting to blossom. However, I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time and found that there was a lack of mentors, collaborators and overall talent for me to tap into. I needed to move somewhere that had a thriving digital ecosystem and, after deep analysis, Austin topped the list. I haven’t looked back since.
Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg
After almost two decades in the CRO game, we moved to Austin, the city whose businesses live by the slogan “Keep Austin Weird”. The move turned out to be a catalyst for many positive changes, personally and professionally.
Austin has truly become the CRO capital of the world. It is full of brilliant CRO practitioners. Over beers a few years ago, our colleagues inspired us to look for a better solution to shared frustrations.
“Keep Austin Weird” had been started to promote local businesses, those who deeply understand and strive to delight Austin’s population. These businesses are fiercely committed to succeed despite the advantages offered by the homogeneity of large national chains.
Bryan and I have worked together with a prestigious list of blue-chip clients to achieve well over $2 Billion in CRO wins. We have trained thousands of people in CRO and written several books, including two New York Times best sellers about CRO.
Nevertheless we share the frustration that CRO, as too many companies practice it today, is a dead end.
It was in Austin that we shifted our focus away from traditional CRO. We pioneered CRO as a study of tactics to increase conversions. Unlike “Keep Austin Weird,” our early efforts lacked the “soul” of marketing, which we later identified—
The key to conversion has always been delighted customers.
In the past we trained and encouraged clients to become experts in many of the CRO disciplines. They got great results! The trouble was, no single siloed discipline was a decisive factor in consistently achieving better results.
We reflected on our nearly twenty years of CRO work. Some companies effortlessly adopted a culture of optimization. Others achieved wins but failed to absorb the lessons learned. Their CRO efforts were after-the-fact fixes; the dead end of many of today’s traditional CRO efforts.
Those companies that excelled evolved a culture of customer-centricity—not at the manager or director level, but in the C-suite. The best companies absorbed CRO learnings and incorporated them into operational changes. That made them superior, not just at fixing, but at creating relevant customer experiences, including marketing campaigns, customer flows and meaningful content.
One of the privileges of working through CRO challenges with diverse organizations over the years was learning that no matter the industry, business size or product, the only story that truly matters is the story that your delighted customers tell about your company—not the one you tell your customer.
We started BuyerLegends.com in the great weird city of Austin to help companies learn how to use the soulful art of storytelling to create customer-centered, data-driven customer experience design, supported by the only story that matters.
Peep Laja
I used to run an SEO agency. When I got my clients to rank #1 for a number of keywords—which, by the way, wasn’t very hard in 2007—I noticed they weren’t necessarily making more money.
That was clue #1.
Then I did a bunch of direct response marketing for information products.
I learned that whoever converts the best can spend the most on traffic.
That was clue #2.
My last SaaS startup failed, I ran out of ideas, and didn’t have a structured process to grow the business. I felt there must be a better way to build businesses. That’s when I discovered Lean Startup.
That was clue #3.
While all of that was taking place, I fell in love with a girl from Austin and ended up moving here. When I started to self-identify as a conversion guy (~2011), I noticed I was surrounded by others who do the same. Total coincidence.
Brett Hurt
My parents were retailers from the time I was born, and my dad was a direct marketer and inventor of the first halogen fishing light. I grew up working in my parents’ store. I also grew up as a programmer, starting at age 7 and programming over 40 hours a week from age 7 to 21.
In 1998, my wife and I launched an online retailer named BodyMatrix, leveraging an eCommerce platform that I had built from scratch over the summer (in between school years at Wharton, where I was earning my MBA). We were thrilled to be getting orders all over the world, from US military bases to the UK.
But we were flying blind. Working in my parent’s stores and helping my dad market his products had gotten me used to understanding customer behavior. I had written my Wharton leadership study on Sam Walton, based on his book Made in America. A key part of Walmart’s early success was understanding customer behavior in their stores.
With all of the advantages of the Internet, it had a huge disadvantage: You couldn’t see anything.
So
I set out to build one of the world’s first Web analytics solutions.
As a student, I couldn’t afford to buy one and the cheap ones (like WebTrends) were very poor, offering only high-level page view counts. I needed to know what was happening within our online store—to at least recreate what I knew about our customers at my parents’ stores.
The lightbulb moment came when I realized I could know even more.
I told my parents how my wife and I had developed the “biggest brain” with the ability to remember all customer behavior. And it worked—we almost doubled our conversion ratio (from 2% to 3.8%) in three months.
This attracted the attention of a PhD student at Wharton who formed his dissertation on the data we had collected and how we could personalize based on it.
I thought this was novel, but I didn’t know how novel it really was. I went to friends, Wharton grads who worked at CDnow and Amazon. To my shock, they urged me to form a business around this.
That’s how Coremetrics was born. I sold my other businesses, including my Web consulting business and BodyMatrix, and put all of my chips on Coremetrics.
We moved the business to Austin, where I was able to attract many fantastic developers, product managers, and client services personnel. We built a global company, became an industry standard in retail, and today IBM owns the company and bases its popular holiday retail benchmarking reports off the foundation of Coremetrics’ analytics and data.
Roger Dooley
I was a data-driven marketer and entrepreneur long before the Internet was popular.
In the early days of home computers, I left a senior strategy position at a Fortune 1000 company and co-founded a catalog business. We did things like square-inch analysis to evaluate products and their positioning, A/B testing to measure the effect of different cover designs, and more. We even did predictive modeling for our call center.
Later, I transitioned to the digital space with a focus on SEO, community building, and conversion. My focus on both quantitative metrics and human behavior helped me build College Confidential, which generates tens of millions of page views per month and ranks as the busiest college-bound website.
Today, I focus on turning scientific research into useful business strategies.
Austin is a great place to work from—there’s a huge tech community, lots of entrepreneurism, and a world-class university. On the non-business side, there’s no snow to shovel, the restaurant and music scenes are diverse, and the breakfast tacos are amazing!
Yuan Wright
I started my career in investment banking and corporate finance. By luck, I was at a large corporation, where you can easily move to different departments. I landed in digital analytics and never looked back!
Immediately, I realized this was what I was made to do. In traditional offline marketing, it’s hard to optimize conversions. But in digital marketing, you have the tools and technology to see the big picture and understand the entire ecosystem of how you’re interacting with the customer.
I truly love analytics because it gets you close to the customer.
Every click, every transaction helps you understand the customer better. It’s also very concrete. A/B testing, for example, only has 3 outcomes: you help business, you don’t help business, or it doesn’t matter. The numbers tell you everything and enable you to make solid business decisions.
At EA, I use data to understand how we can optimize the multi-channel platforms to support customers through their entire life cycle: acquisition, conversion, growth and support. The goal? A frictionless journey along the way
It’s hard to imagine doing this anywhere but Austin. This truly is the Conversion Capital of the World. It’s a digital hub that attracts top tech folks, and it offers culture, diversity, and opportunities for intelligent exchange. I love it, and I’m honored to be here.
Neil Iscoe
As CEO of Digital Certainty (now Sentient Ascend), I help businesses stay creative by providing a system that does the hard work of optimizing their landing pages for them. Digital Certainty helps marketers become more productive by using machine-learning to more quickly produce better results.
I’ve been in Austin a long time, receiving my PhD in Computer Sciences from UT in 1985, creating a product development lab for HP and, prior to founding Digital Certainty, being responsible for commercializing the results of the $550M of annual research performed by the University of Texas.
I’ve always been interested in data, but I realized its power when I was in graduate school.
I wanted to know what ±3% really meant.
So I attended a summer program at the University of Michigan, the home of survey sampling, and it evolved from there.
That was a really long time ago, but data is still at the core of what we do. It’s such a cool area, where you can use data to bring about real results.
Austin’s diverse talent base dovetails with the multi-disciplinary nature of CRO. Austin’s energy, rather than producing multitudes of largely indistinguishable apps, is like CRO: focused on results.
There’s remarkable unanimity of purpose and support. Technology companies can take advantage of an active ecosystem that includes incubators, city council, university, SXSW, chamber of commerce, and multiple support organizations.
And, of course, we’ve got the best breakfast tacos in the world.
Kate Morris
Data-driven marketing was something I was interested in when I started at the University of Texas. I got my BBA in Marketing and my specialization (via electives) in Customer Relationship Management. It’s similar to what I ended up in, but the online world was just getting going at that time.
Even then, though, I could see that having the data to back up plans of growth was imperative. I got into the online marketing world and have not looked back.
It’s an industry built on data and measurement. It was so great to learn that online marketing could do what marketers had such a hard time with in the past: measure impact. It’s still not perfect by any means, but
I love being able to show results and test theories.
I spent 4 years in Seattle, but my home has always been here. The Austin community is so supportive—and rooted in data, conversations, and development. We have some of the best conversion-based minds, and I am proud to call some of them friends.
Kenneth Cho
Prior to People Pattern, I founded a company called Spredfast, a social media management platform for the enterprise.
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas approached us to integrate social media into an awareness campaign for an Edgar Allen Poe exhibit. We initially targeted traditional literary societies and book clubs around central Texas, but I came to notice a large segment of high school girls—more specifically “Goth” girls—leading the conversation.
These girls all had one thing in common: They were social followers of Marilyn Manson, who was a vocal admirer of Edgar Allen Poe.
I suggested the HRC target ads at Facebook followers of Goth bands—and foot traffic to the exhibition tripled.
I started to recognize a shift in importance from understanding the conversation to understanding who is behind the conversation and teamed up with UT Professor of Computational Linguistics Jason Baldridge to found People Pattern.
People Pattern is a SaaS platform that helps brands identify and activate psychographic segments via semi-supervised machine learning and natural language processing. There is no longer an alternative to data-driven marketing. Understanding existing and desired customers through brand data is paramount for marketers.
The combination of digital marketing software companies and the University of Texas makes Austin a hotbed of technology and up-and-coming talent, and hiring the best and brightest to uncover and scale audience insights will enable our platform to maintain its competitive edge.
Leslie Mock
Launching one of the first public online colleges tossed me headlong into online marketing. Filling classes was crucial and new tools like email marketing became an amazing way to run campaigns, easily track what was happening and tweak things to get better and better results.
Cool. No more months of creating print ads and wondering if anyone ever saw them.
I then spearheaded online marketing for other businesses and organizations—
I was sold when we saved one company hundreds of thousands of dollars in less than a year
by shifting to data-driven marketing. No more “marketing to everyone and hoping it works”.
Along the way, I started a natural product line, an ecommerce business, and a media company that works with clients to get great marketing results by funneling their big vision into measurable outcomes: All possible because of the magic of data-driven marketing.
(I’m also an introverted entrepreneur and started a community to share tips and advice. You can join us at TheInnerpreneur on Facebook).
Austin is the home to SXSW Interactive, a plethora of entrepreneurs and creative start-ups. The best data-driven marketers live here and so do I. How lucky is that?
Ethan Luke Stenis
I was drawn to Austin for the reputable advertising graduate program at the University of Texas, but I stayed for the music scene and food trucks.
Upon graduation, I burst out of UT Advertising graduate program with the ambitious goal of making Super Bowl commercials by the dozen, but once I experienced the traditional ad agency life, I realized it wasn’t my style.
I knew data-driven marketing was important once I began working as a direct response copywriter at an Austin digital marketing agency. Using SEO/SEM best practices and a dynamic analytical toolbox, I learned how to create actionable copy, track and interpret traffic stats, increase engagement, and optimize conversion rates.
It was a warm, sunny morning, and I was drinking some rich, Colombian coffee when it hit me:
If content is king, then data is the emperor.
Once I cleaned up the coffee I spit out and apologized to the rest of the meeting members for the unexplained interruption, I smiled to myself, re-calibrated my career goals, and began down the road to mastering all that is data.
Jane Dueease
I got started in data driven marketing in college, while working on the golf course as the beer cart girl.
You have a lot of time to think when you are a beer cart girl. And I thought a lot about how to make more $$ from my customers.
There are only 18 holes on a golf course, and each team can have a max of 8 people at a time. It takes 4 hours on average to play a round of golf, so for an 8-hour shift on the course, I maxed out at 288 customers.
That sounds like a lot. But most golfers are not drinking beer and they can only drink so many sodas. Worse, they would often stop and go to the bathroom after the first nine and grab a drink/snack at the bar, leaving me with less money. So I had to create ways to fix this.
I got approval to bring liquor onto the beer cart, along with fresh sandwiches, hot coffee, hot chocolate, better snacks and sweets. I tried everything! Each change I would document and report back to the GM.
Again I had a lot of time on my hands.
Then I started to personalize my cart based on who was playing that day. Over time I got to know each members’ needs and wants, and I’d add Coors Light for Mr. Smith or 16-ounce cans of Miller Lite for Mr. Jones.
Each change, each customer, I documented as well as my earnings. I got my GM to pull beer cart sales from the prior year—and that’s when I learned that I had tripled the sales from the prior year.
My little “book” became my bible—even the pro’s wanted in. I kept more data on their customers than they did. I loved it.
I made more money, my customers were happy, my boss was happy and I knew what everyone wanted.
I think about those days, circling the course again and again, and the data (customers) sitting right in front of me all the time. It is why I love data today. Some of it is so simple yet so powerful.
I pulled basic sales data from a recent ecommerce customer: a simple heat map of sales by day of the week, and time of day. I wanted to know what their best-selling day and time was. As it turns out, 25% of their sales came on Sunday from 5 to midnight. Guess when they took the site down for maintenance/ upgrades/ launches?
Yep. On Sunday nights after 9 pm.
After presenting the data, we moved the maintenance windows to 6 am–10 am on Monday, our slowest sales day and time. Everyone was happier—especially the IT folks who got to launch during normal business hours.
Data is powerful. It tells you what your customers want (Coors Light), when they want it (Sunday nights) and so much more. Through testing, you can take opinion (the VP loves blue buy buttons) out of the equation and replace it with what the customers want (green buy buttons), turning marketing into the sales machine is should be.
Now how does Austin fit into this? I moved to Austin because I wanted to be back in Texas (I’m from Houston originally), and it was the only city I wanted to live in. Austin is the perfect location because it is such a cutting edge blend of IT, Entrepreneurs, and the universities.
Conversion as a science (vs. personal opinion) is only now gaining traction. Austin is open to it because it loves all things weird, and some of the lessons learned from looking at conversion data are weird. Just like Austin.
Kevin Koym
I founded Tech Ranch in 2008 on the idea that I could provide incubation education to entrepreneurs by focusing on the individuals instead of the startup itself.
This decision was rooted in my mission to provide a platform to impact social good.
Prior to that, I had learned that there was a gap in the market and used market-driven data to discover where the “sweet spot” would exist for a new company. I learned that entrepreneurs could easily exchange equity for dollars, but that didn’t help them improve themselves or their prospects for success after exciting their current venture.
My team and I realized that Austin was the perfect place to marry the desire to focus on the triple bottom line while still helping pioneers impact global change. Austin provides a unique community that supports all industries and works together to help startups reach their goals. Seasoned successes are always willing to share their data and experience with those new to the scene.
Therefore, as we continue to educate entrepreneurs, we help them realize that by using data—driven by research and market insights—they can avoid “reinventing the wheel”. We encourage the use of both secondary and primary research to help them narrow down their target marketing, position themselves against the competition and prepare for investor due diligence.
Mani Iyer
I’m a serial entrepreneur, startup advisor, and industry speaker on demand generation, pipeline acceleration, cross-channel marketing, B2B marketing and advertising. I’ve spoken at leading industry conferences including Ad-Tech, Leadscon, Conversion Conference, Online Marketing Summit, DemandCon, TiECon, and Startup Summit. Before that, I was a marketing consultant to VC-backed start-ups and founded a software business acquired by Oracle/PeopleSoft.
Now, as CEO of Kwanzoo, a cloud-based platform for full-funnel retargeting and personalized display campaigns, it really gets me when marketers don’t do their homework, throwing out yet another “off message,” irrelevant ad in that fleeting moment when they finally have someone’s attention.
This just has to change!
Life is too short. And it’s moving faster every day. There are better ways to spend our time, both at home and at work.
All marketers have to do is “connect the data dots” to avoid irrelevant messaging.
That’s why I love data-driven marketing. It’s the only thing that can propel that change.
Why Austin?
Gartner says CMOs will soon overtake CIOs in the enterprise. Foundation Capital, a leading Bay Area VC firm predicts a 10X growth in marketing technology over the next 10 years. Here at Kwanzoo, we were convinced we needed to look beyond Silicon Valley as we grew our Customer Success, Sales and Marketing teams.
With its lower costs, high quality of life, music, culture, outdoors, the UT system and more, it’s been a great move for us. We are thrilled to be a part of the vibrant Austin technology and entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Charles Hua
I didn’t start out my career as a marketer. As an engineer, I always thought marketers were a bunch of party animals, that a quants person like me would not fit in with that crowd.
It wasn’t until I joined the CRM group at Dell’s Austin headquarters that
I learned there is a nerdy side to marketing.
I started out testing covers, formats and paper thickness when I was at the direct marketing department at Dell.
That’s the point at which I learned marketing is actually about numbers as much as about gut feelings and creativity. The digital revolution really sped up this process of experimentation. It provides much richer data sets, segmentation and personalization, providing all kinds possibilities to respond to our customers.
Even if I weren’t a number-nerd, I’d tell you data-driven decision-making through experimentation is the key to gain a competitive edge.
Austin matters to me primarily because it’s my home. I graduated from UT and have lived here ever since. Who wouldn’t want to? The food is awesome.
Justin Rondeau
On a January morning early in my career as a marketer in software, the CEO of the company told me that I needed to increase revenues. I asked “How?”, and
I was quickly reminded that it was my job to increase revenues, not his.
Kind of a bummer statement, especially since I had very little control over the website at the time.
We had a fairly large, but unresponsive email list, so I dug through the data to develop a new campaign and split tested along the way. I presented my findings, and this gave me the chance to start optimizing the website—the place that was originally off limits to me!
Data was the key to growing my career, and every campaign I created made it easy to point to the causal relationship between the changes we made and the revenues we gained.
I was hooked and never looked back.
I’m not a full-time Austinite yet—I come down from Boston for a week each month, so it is really my second home (Austin… Boston… they even sound alike). But I feel completely at home here. I love the food, my team at DM, the music, and the impromptu conversion meetups at local bars with some of the best in the industry.
Chris Mercer
As co-owner of Seriously Simple Marketing, I work with top direct response marketers from around the world, improving revenues as they optimize funnel by funnel.
I knew the data-driven approach was for me when I realized just how much Google Analytics could bring to the table.
There is a disconnect for most marketers between the ‘out-of-the-box’ Google Analytics default install and what’s actually possible once you know how to set it up properly. When I learned how to do that, it opened up a whole new world!
I’ve been helping to spread the word to other optimizers ever since and recently created a course (called Seriously Simple Analytics) to help marketers use tools like Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager properly, so they can move from “guessing what works” to “measuring what works”.
Why Austin? We’ve lived in places like San Diego, Portland, Seattle and New York… but nothing beats Austin!
Microbrews, hiking in the greenbelt, and an entrepreneurial electricity that you can’t help but feel in the air
, are just some of the things that first drew my wife and me to this incredible city.
We now call Austin home because of the incredible group of talented people we’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with. There’s just nothing like it. (Wait… did I mention the microbrews?!?)
Craig Tomlin
With 20 years of experience on both the client-side and the agency-side, I’ve grown revenue for firms like BlackBerry, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Disney, and IBM.
I learned that data-driven marketing was important while an Account Director at a local agency, where analytics and engagement data coupled with behavioral data from usability testing allowed me to grow client revenue by 300% for key accounts. It probably also helped win two Marketo Revvies and a Killer Content Award from Content Marketing Institute.
It was the combination of data and analytics audits — the “what’s happening” data
— coupled with the behavioral data coming from usability testing, that made the big difference. Using both gave a much clearer picture, not only of what was happening on a website, but why it was happening.
Armed with that intelligence, it’s easy to formulate entirely new hypotheses for testing, using an A/B approach that can be far more effective, giving much bigger increases in conversion.
Why Austin?
I moved here from Southern California at the height of the recession because I had three job offers in Texas: one in Houston, one in San Antonio and one in Austin. After visiting all three, it was apparent that, with its small yet dynamic and entrepreneurial atmosphere, it’s hill country with lakes all around, and the exceptional schools for my family—Austin was the best place for us.
And with over 100 people moving to Austin every day I guess I’m not alone in that decision!
Austin, the perfect environment for CROs
If you always thought conversion rate optimization was only for number-nerds, I hope you’re convinced otherwise. Sure, there’s a lot of data that goes into the process, but there’s another side to the optimization game.
Several of our experts commented on the “other” side of data—meeting the needs of their best customers. The Eisenbergs went so far as to call this the “soul” of marketing.
Ultimately, though optimizers work with numbers, they’re marketing to people. And they know it.
[ The data simply helps them improve their ability to connect with those people—even to the point of delighting them.
Perhaps that’s why other tech or marketing centers aren’t measuring up to Austin. Here, you have the cultural diversity and creativity to bring data and people together.
Sure, Austin is a cluster of conversion optimizers. But here, they also have a life.
User Engagement was Low on These Websites. See How They Changed That.
Conversion-Centered DesignI’ve seen plenty of websites that are beautifully designed and portray a strong sense of professionalism.
And that’s great. But it’s not enough.
Many businesses are missing out on a crucial opportunity to get their visitors to actually engage with their website. Think about it. If you can get your visitors to actually do something while on your site and engage them, there’s a greater chance that you’re going to push them through the funnel.
Case Study: Increasing Homepage Engagement
Here’s a brilliant example. Take a look at the Super Fast Funding website.
This is their original page. There was not a lot of opportunity for visitors to engage upon landing on the home page.
Super Fast Funding’s original website didn’t offer many ways to engage.
The picture on the right hand side doesn’t tell us much. It’s nearly impossible to decipher or read the text on documents at which our friendly smiley faced cartoon is pointing.
There are also several other things going wrong here.
The main headline asks “Are you fundable?” There are two possible answers to that question: yes or no.
Don’t ever ask your visitors a question that could be answered negatively with a “No” response. It creates doubt and in their minds, could immediately disqualify them from further engagement with your site.
Instead, give them hope like in this new version of their home page. Kudos to this new design. Super Fast Funding has added several elements to dramatically increase visitor engagement.
The slider bar invites the visitor to start interacting with the page and this can increase conversion rates.
They’ve preceded their phone number with the verbage “Questions?”. They’ve added a video rather than just an “Our Video” link in the main menu bar since many people opt out of watching a video if there isn’t a propelling thumbnail to get them interested.
A Live Chat link has been added at the very top of the page. A blog has been added. And they’ve also added a “Get Started” button.
Now that’s engagement.
But what I really liked about this page is the slider bar that they’ve added that allows visitors to choose the amount of funding that they’d like to receive.
Not only did they eliminate the possibility of a “No” answer, but they’ve made the experience very interactive for their visitors (while also giving them a sense of control), and by doing so, they’ve dramatically increased visitor engagement.
Do you see now why amping up the opportunities for visitor engagement is important to increasing sales, revenue, customer acquisition and a larger portion of the market share? A website provides far greater opportunity for engagement over other marketing collateral mediums. It’s a shame if you don’t take advantage of that.
Case Study: Screen Sharing for Easier Engagement
LiveLOOK – which was acquired by Oracle last year – has added a bit of brilliance in how they’re tackling online customer service issues: their solution makes it possible for merchants to assist their online shoppers through screen sharing.
Have you ever been in a brick and mortar store where a clerk has had to help you step by step with a transaction? I experienced it recently when a clerk had to help me through a scanning system that I had no clue how to operate. Had he not been there to help me, there would have been no transaction.
Screen sharing, in essence, does the same thing. When your visitors are completely stumped, merchants can get onto the shoppers’ screen and take actions for the visitor to assist them in the transaction.
One of the nation’s leading health insurance organizations utilized LiveLOOK’s co-browse solution to improve upon customer service issues, and it helped guide visitors through a variety of online processes including registering, paying bills online and finding more information. The most immediate result was the drastic reduction in call handling times. Calls that previously took up to an hour were reduced to 7-10 minutes on average.
That 85% reduction in call times created a savings in resources and compensation for those resources. Call center agents have also reported less visitor frustration which helps them to generate loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Tools to Increase User Engagement
Don’t forget, there are other ways to engage visitors and – just as importantly – ways to track that engagement.
HotJar is a company that has made it really easy to track engagement by offering multiple tools in one bundled solution. Not only do they offer the engagement tools, but the solution also offers tools to track visitor engagement.
In a brick and mortar store, clerks are face to face with shoppers, so if they’re smart, they can communicate directly with those shoppers to help them through the buying process.
It’s vital that you do the same with your online store. The HotJar bundled solution includes:
There are other options for click tracking, session recordings, and heat maps that you can read about at MyConversionLab.com.
Surveys
In an effort to find out how knowledgeable users were on tech terms, a survey conducted by Vouchercloud.net revealed that 27% thought a “gigabyte” was an insect found in South America, 23% believed that an “MP3” was a Star Wars robot and 18% thought that a “Blu-ray” was a marine animal. According to the Harvard University’s 2014 Senior Survey, 13.17% of Harvard seniors admitted to cheating during their tenure at the school.
Who would have known unless the questions were asked?
Surveys are another way to obtain valuable feedback from your visitors. You can ask your visitors all of the questions you’d like to ask if you were face to face. When you’re putting together a survey, be sure to ask open ended questions that will provide you with more information rather than yes/no questions.
Exit Polls
Exit polls are boxes that pop up, but this time while your visitors are leaving. They typically ask visitors what issues they experienced that kept them from making a purchase, so it’s a quick and easy way to find out what’s keeping a website’s visitors from converting.
Heat Mapping
If you’re not familiar with the technology, heat mapping is where a small piece of code is inserted into your web page so that a visual representation can be created showing where visitors are clicking. And just as importantly, where they are not.
As you can see from the graph bar in the heat map image below, colors show just how many clicks are being made in a particular area. The color coding gives a visual representation with the color red representing the most clicks.
An incredible number of people click on the About link in the upper right corner. What does this mean?
Visitor Playback Sessions
Visitor playback sessions take this type of tracking to another level. With visitor playback sessions you can actually watch a recorded video of visitors as they move around your site. You can see where they stop, where they scroll and where they click which means you can see where they get stumped and what might keep them from spending money on your site.
User Tester Recruitment
I’ve had some strong debates with companies in regards to my website audit recommendations – that is until the user tests come in and back up my findings. I wait to view user tests last to see if the users agree with what I’ve recommended.
User Testing allows you to look over the shoulders of people while they browse your site. You get a first hand glance as to where they are getting stuck or having issues.
Form and Funnel Analysis
Funnel and form analysis gives you data on where visitors are dropping out of your forms and funnels and lets you fix those issues.
Conclusion
Without tracking and analyzing your visitors engagement, it’s going to be very difficult to figure out how to improve their experiences. You could have a site complete with copywriting, images, and design that are absolutely spectacular, but it’s that interaction and engagement that’s going to provide you with the valuable feedback you need in order to be aware of issues that are frustrating and confusing your visitors, and it’s also going to give you the opportunity to assist them in getting past those frustrations.
About the Author
Marie Dean is the Innovation Director at CoversionLifters and has been an expert in the field of conversion optimization for 12 years. She helps clients improve their website conversions, increase revenue, lower acquisition costs and capture more of the market share through in-depth website analysis.
Feature Image Photo Credit: KayeNicole via Compfight cc and adapted for this post
Landing Page Templates that Maximize Conversions
Conversion-Centered DesignWhat to look for in a high-converting landing page template.
A friend of mine recently offered me an expensive Giant brand road bike that he wasn’t using in exchange for some help on his website.
He runs a local carpet cleaning service in San Marcos, Texas just south of the Conversion Capital of the World. He hadn’t spent much time on his website, and wanted to update it. While we don’t necessarily recommend redesigns, I felt this one needed a face lift.
Sometimes, you just need to start over.
I love the bubbles, but I doubt they are helping conversion rates. I haven’t seen animations like this since the 1990s. The background image slows load time and confuses the eye. The graduated fill on the buttons makes them all but unreadable.
Don’t laugh at my friends design. Here is a WordPress theme I recently reviewed. Check out the stars.
These stars don’t move the value proposition forward. Maybe it works for NASA.
Then there’s this:
Animation for animations sake is not helpful for scanners. Note the slow loading of the background image.
My friend needed a new theme for his WordPress site.
Fortunately, I had been asked to be a judge in the ThemeForest PageWiz template contest. More specifically, my task was to pick the themes that would make the best landing page templates.
I’ll tell you how I ranked these themes based on my experience, based on tests we’ve conducted here at Conversion Sciences, and based on my work as an online marketer who uses WordPress in my business.
47 Landing Page Templates, One Winner
The typical “Banded Sales Page” delivers the value proposition for a page in separate sections, or bands.
I reviewed 47 different PageWiz landing page templates created by designers. I was tasked with picking one I felt embodied the best practices in conversion-centric landing page design.
The goal of a landing page is to:
1) Keep the promise of an ad, email or link.
2) Get the visitor to take some action, to convert.
Most of the themes I reviewed followed a common pattern, one I call a “banded sales page.”
These are designed to unfold like a sales letter: Big promise at the top, and an unfolding story, or value proposition, as you scroll. Key parts of the story are separated into sections, often with bands of color or images to identify them.
The support for the value proposition is like that found in an old-style sales letter: claims, features and proof. Trust builders, such as testimonials and client logos are also an important part of the this style.
Most themes chose big images for background filler. This is an unfortunate choice, because slow load times mean lower conversion rates. It looks cool, but you know what’s cooler? More sales.
This style of page templates doesn’t provide a significant amount of space for copy, and this may be to their detriment. Instead, they provide bite-sized information to build the value proposition, perfect for scanning the page. These bite-sized sections are most commonly presented in bands of different background colors.
For example, the Landing Page Elements Theme wastes a lot of valuable space for a rather irrelevant image.
Large images take a long time to load and often don’t move the value proposition forward.
Some of the themes used parallax scrolling features, which we have not tested, but which may actually add friction to the experience, reducing conversions.
The Theme Should Serve Your Market
The landing page really needs to serve it’s audience. I found the highest scoring templates to be those that were for specific kinds of businesses: fitness, real estate, conferences, travel.
My pick is the Avira Homes template because of its creative calls to action and excellent mobile experience. It suffers from big images and almost fell out of the running.
Mobile Friendly is a Must
I’ll get this out of the way now. No responsive design made my list of top templates. I know it’s an easy way to get a mobile site, but mobile is different than desktop. Design a separate template for mobile.
Look for a landing page template that supports a separate mobile experience.
The Knights Theme offers a mobile theme separate from their desktop implementation.
Mobile Visitors Want Different Content
I made mobile support an important part of the criteria, because it is a growing traffic source for almost any industry. Most themes relied on responsive designs. Others had dedicated mobile templates. Many themes actually break when displayed on phone-sized screens.
We favor designs with dedicated mobile designs, as responsive designs have myriad problems for landing pages. Responsive designs often don’t make sense as desktop content is stacked in non-intuitive ways. These mobile sites also tend to load slower than their dedicated mobile cousins.
Most desktop themes won’t offer a map on their home page or landing pages. For mobile visitors, where we are is important. Maps are a great addition to your mobile experience.
Mobile-oriented content like maps are often lost in responsive designs.
Mobile visitors also want bigger buttons, click-to-call functionality and mobile-focused calls to action. Notice how the Avira site (my winner) offers click to call as the first-screen call to action in their mobile theme. Their desktop site offers a form and the “Contact Me” button.
Avira’s separate mobile app is designed for a uniquely mobile experience.
The Avira Real Estate Theme was my choice for overall winner.
The Page Should Load Fast
I was happy to see that none of these pages had scrolling hero images, called sliders. These slow load times and can distract readers from the information on the page.
The slow load time of the VPropos theme left us with nothing to watch.
The slow load time of this theme left us with nothing to watch.
The Theme Should Make Good Use of the First Screen
It is important that a landing page communicate that the visitor can take action on the page. It should be done early. There is a segment of your visitors that are looking to take action. They don’t want to read, they want to put things in motion.
The FlatVault theme makes good use of the top of the page using calls to action.
In contrast to the landing page templates with large images, I felt that FlatVaulth did a good job of utilizing the top portion of the page, with not one but two calls to action.
The Copy Should Be Easy to Read
I favor designs with dark text on light backgrounds for readability. Knockout text is hard for eyes over 40 to read. Pages that are mostly dark cause our pupils to widen. This larger aperture makes focusing more difficult. That’s why we squint when we are trying to read small text. It makes our aperture smaller.
Light text on a dark background is more difficult for older eyes that have trouble focusing.
The App Cast Theme may be best for young eyes.
A good designer uses color to guide the eye. The use of the same color makes it harder to locate the information that is important. For example, pricing tables job is to help us choose. In this pricing table, it’s clear that the center offering is more important, but the color choices make it hard to compare across offerings.
The poor color choices make it hard to compare options.
The Landing Elements Vol 2 Theme make poor color choices.
Contrast is your friend, especially when your presenting headlines and calls to action.
The headline and call to action are difficult to read here because of a low contrast between background and text.
The green and red backgrounds offer a low contrast background for the headline and form’s call to action in the Brom theme.
Make Good Use of Images and Video
If a theme didn’t explicitly support video, I didn’t hold it against theme. Several did. Video is all over the map in terms of whether it works or not. It is a powerful medium that can work for you or against you.
Images are powerful ways to move the value proposition of the site forward. Unfortunately, designers often punt, using filler stock images instead of well-thought out pictures. Unfortunately, theme builders really can’t offer one image that communicates well for all of the possible sites their theme may ride on.
The Cube Consulting Theme makes good use of image placement here.
This image is in the right place, but is clearly a stock image. The human eye knows when it sees what we call business porn.
The man in this theme is what we call “business porn.” It is a stock image, not someone who works at the company or is a customer. The placement of this image is smart. It anchors the call to action form visually which partly covers the image.
A better image would have been looking down at the form, or to the value proposition at the left. We tend to linger on faces, especially when they are looking right at us. If we’re looking at a face, we’re not reading the offer text or the calls to action.
Be careful of images that work against you.
The dot-matrix background and gratuitous keyboard image only work to make the text hard to read in this image.
The Expo Theme uses a dot-matrix background that messes with the eyes and makes the text harder to read. Why is there a keyboard in the background?
This background image conflicts with the call to action, confusing the eye.
One problem of our winning theme, Avira, is the poor choice of a background image. This image conflicts with the call to action form.
Shapes
The shape of your images can have impact as well. After viewing over 40 different themes with the banded designs, I found these curved images refreshing.
The shape of your images can draw the eye to important page components.
The Dyxalot Theme curved hero image draws the eye to the center where the key messages are.
Avoid Useless Images
If I have to find a large, high-resloution image that’s relevant to my visitor and figure out how to not screen it back, that’s a theme that is too much work.
This design is typical of the designs that waste precious real estate at the top of the page with nothing relevant.
A lot of space was dedicated to red buildings in this theme. What’s the message?
The Mobis Theme wastes a lot of space with a background picture of buildings. Unecessarily large images push your value proposition and calls to action down on the page, where they are less likely to be seen.
Make Images Clickable
Make images clickable, even if there’s a button below. These are not.
Clicking on the buttons works, but the images are not clickable. Don’t get in your visitors’ way.
The MyCourse Theme should make their images clickable.
Calls to Action
Calls to action should be the most visually prominent items on the page.
The use of arrows and button colors that clash with the other colors on the page signal that the call to action should be addressed by the visitor.
High contrast buttons and arrows signal to the visitor that they should address the call to action.
The My Earth Non-profit Theme enhances the visibility of the call to action.
More Calls to Action
For long banded pages, they should be frequent. You never know when your visitor is seeing the content that pushes them to take action in a long-scrolling landing page.
Our winning theme, Avira, offered a variety of calls to action, from the ability to inquire about specific properties to general inquiries. It invited visitors to call and offered lead generation forms at the top and bottom of the page.
You never know when copy or an image is going to incite a visitor to act. Use frequent calls to action.
Your Forms Should Behave
Form behavior should make completion intuitive and natural. When someone hits tab in your form, they should be taken to the next field, not another part of the page.
The form for the Urane Theme looks like this:
Be careful if you use the tab button here (and most of us do).
When I type my name and click Tab, it jumps to a random part of the page.
Surprise behaviors will kill your conversion rates.
Use a Dripping Pan
If someone reads your page to the bottom, this is a pretty good sign that they are interested. Themes should repeate the call to action at the bottom of the page. We call this a dripping pan because it catches the juices to make gravy.
This form appears at the bottom of the page. It’s a dripping pan.
The dripping pan for the MyPro Affiliate Theme offers a complete form and call to action.
App Store Buttons
If you’re doing a theme for an app download, the call to action is to visit an app store. I recommend that you not redesign these buttons. They should be recognizable as clicks to the Google Play store and iTunes app store.
The most recognizable app store button designs are used across the Web.
The Dyxalot Theme makes this call to action almost invisible.
These download calls to action are almost invisible
The App Cast Mobile Theme offers company logos, not app store logos.
Are these company logos or app store download buttons?
The Volax Theme offers more clues that this is an app download, but this is not a fimiliar image for the app stores.
The addition of download counts adds social proof, but what am I downloading exactly?
Plan for Proof and Trust
Presenting proof is very important, and several themes offered interesting ways to present proof. Claims made in your copy must be supported by a benefit and proof.
The Expo theme presents a place for proof points
The Expo theme presents a place for proof points.
Websites can “borrow” trust from other brands by showing logos, seals and badges. Client logos, partner logos, and even the logos of credit cards all conspire to build trust with visitors. Themes that support this were ranked higher in my judging.
Websites can “borrow” trust from clients, partners and media outlets by displaying their logos
Unfortunately, the MyPro Theme made a poor choice for the background of these trust building logos.
Induce Scrolling
One of the concerns with banded pages like those in this competition is that every scroll can look like the bottom of the page. Visitors may never scroll further to see the persuasive content lower on the page.
Themes that induced scrolling were ranked higher on my list.
The Upfold Theme provides several scrolling queues. The v-shaped header image invites visitors to scroll down.
A simple arrow-shaped image can induce scrolling, making your copy more effective.
Connective lines between sections signal visitors that there is more to see. This keeps people scrolling.
Subtle connective lines signal that there is more information to follow as the visitor scrolls.
Consider Introducing Scarcity
If your offer has a deadline, you can use countdown timers to introduce “scarcity.” This communicates that an offer is about to expire and that the visitor should take action immediately.
Countdown timers are effective, and several themes incorporated them into their pages.
Count down timers can introduce scarcity into the visitor’s decision making process.
The Pagewiz Event Conference Meetup Theme places a countdown timer in the body of the page.
Scarcity is a natural fit for events.
Elect! Political Charity Conference Theme places a countdown timer right below the hero image.
Social Distraction
The most common distraction I see on landing pages is social media icons. Traffic is never free. Even search traffic requires you to optimize and develop content. If you’ve paid for a visitor to come to your site, why send them off to Mark Zuckerberg? He’s god enough traffic.
The social icons are muted, but shouldn’t be at the top of the page competing with the call to action.
The social icons are muted here, but save them for the thank you page.
The social icons on the FlatBox Theme are the most visible (and thus the most important) items above the fold.
The social media icons really pop on this dark background. The message is that these are the most important things on the page.
Only use if social media is a great source of visitors for your site. Instead of a dripping pan at the bottom of the page, FlatBox offers a smorgasbord of distractions.
Most businesses aren’t good at turning likes and follows into business. Save these buttons for the thank you page.
The best use of social media I saw was the RealGym Theme, my runner up. This use of social media turns gym trainers into social sales people
Here the social icons support the business model directly by turning trainers into social salespeople.
Help Me Choose a Plan
If you offer multiple levels of service or product tiers, the job of your pricing matrix is to, Help Me Choose. Your landing page template should highlight one price package to help my visitors choose.
The Mobis Multipurpose Landing Page Theme offers three colors, none of which is more prominent than any other.
Which of these is most popular? Which should I choose? It’s hard to tell.
The Urane Theme offers a highlighted choice.
This design says,”I should pay attention to the middle one, and not just choose the cheapest.”
Pricing tables that make it easy to compare features will improve conversion rates.
The Landing Elements Vol 1 Theme offers banding to help guide the eye across features.
Alternating colors help guide the eye and aid in comparing features.
Pricing tables should not attempt to sell features. You should only select a few criteria–three or four–to be placed in the pricing table. Let the copy do the rest of the selling.
Use helpful names as well.
Choose the descriptive names for your feature levels.
The Flat Vault Theme suggests “Basic”, “Pro” and “Elite” levels. These generic names are translated as “Cheap”, “Expensive” and “Only for big companies”. Be more clear in your naming. Choose names that convey relevant value.
No Template is Going to Have It All
This is a lot to consider when picking a theme. None of the landing page templates I reviewed scored perfect on all counts.
Your business may have special needs. If building trust is important, focus on themes that support trust and proof. If you serve mobile visitors, be sure to use a separate theme for your mobile site.
For almost any site, Readability, Calls to action, and Load Time are going to be critical.
Any theme you produce will need to be optimized for your unique visitors. Contact Conversion Sciences for a free consultation on your site.
Now I can ride my new bike and know that I selected the best template for my carpet-cleaning friend.
Here’s the dripping pan.
21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks
Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.
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A Landing Page for the Heart: Your Online Dating Profile [New Series]
Landing Page OptimizationYou can’t get into website optimization without it leaking into the rest of your life. You see the world differently. At Conversion Sciences, we obsess about optimization and the affect on our lives is interesting.
Basically, we are appealing to your base nature to help you make more money in your business.We tally the coffee orders of those in line ahead of us to help with your decision.
We leave the house at the EXACT same time each day when trying alternative commutes. Of course we use the stopwatch for accuracy.
We do a quick evaluation of the speed of the grocery store checkout people before choosing a line.
And we optimize our dating lives.
We see this as an opportunity to introduce landing page concepts to a broader audience. Lots of people get excited about optimizing their dating profile. Landing page optimization makes the accountant smile. Dating profile optimization makes the heart smile.
I would like to invite you into the world of optimization obsession by introducing you to a new series of blog posts coming your way: Optimize My Dating Life.
[dating-series]
We asked Megan – one of our Conversion Scientists – to document an optimization project in which she applies everything she knows about increasing conversion rates to her online dating profile. Ultimately, a dating profile is nothing more than a lead-generating landing page, so it’s just waiting to be optimized.
How is an Online Dating Profile a Lead-Generating Landing Page?
A dating profile certainly serves a specific purpose. You know what that purpose is, but do the people who visit your profile? You’ve undoubtedly heard horror stories at happy hours from your single friends, or maybe you have a few stories of your own. Misunderstandings occurring as a result of a miscommunication on a dating profile.
For a time, my profile listed my favorite book as Batman: the Dark Knight Returns. I came to understand this was an error in judgment on my part. I went on dates with four different people who assumed I would be able to keep up in a conversation discussing the history of the Marvel (or is it DC?) universe. Just to clarify: I couldn’t keep up.
Maybe you’ve created a landing page for an expensive giveaway only to receive a bafflingly low quality and quantity of leads. Were you really communicating what you thought you were?
Previous research has determined that it all comes down to the picture. These studies were only measuring inquiries, the number of people who try to connect. We want to go deeper. We want to judge the quality of the connections.
Look at her, she’s adorbs. Who wouldn’t want to date that face?
Looks aren’t everything, right? Well, the right images are important — on your dating profile and on your landing pages.
We’ll be testing other important components of dating landing pages: trust builders, proof points and offers.
Yes, I said, “offers”. Will the right offer on a dating landing page make the difference? We can’t wait to find out.
Finally, we want to measure the quality of our “leads”. You’ve probably been on dates with people you chose because of their level of attractiveness only to find out they’re as interesting as elevator music. You’ve probably been approached by someone who saw your lovely little mug and that person wanted to ask you on a date without knowing anything about how smart and cool and interesting you are.
And you’ve probably visited a landing page with a design that was absolutely beautiful. A work of art. But for the life of you, couldn’t figure out what you were being asked to do.
What Are We Studying?
We will be attempting to make our little project as scientific as possible so that you will be better able to incorporate our successes (and avoid our failures) in your own landing pages.
Megan will be creating a few different dating profiles, and we will attempt to isolate the actual written content of her profile and her user pictures.
Example of a free-form question where answers could change across profiles and over the course of the project
okcupid tries to match people based on a series of questions, what each person is seeking by using the service, and location, and we will be keeping all of this information the same across all of the profiles so that she has a greater chance of showing up in the same searches for the same people.
Example of information that will be a control across all profiles
Example of information that will be a control across all profiles
Example of a potential okcupid question that will be a control across all profiles
Because lead-generation is the end goal, we will be measuring the quality and quantity of leads received on each of her profiles. Megan’s first task will be to create a quality matrix that will allow her to rate each of her leads and avoid relying on how physically attractive they are. So we’ll be looking at Megan’s own profile and making changes to increase the number of quality leads she receives, but we’ll also be looking at the potential leads’ profiles and rating them.
What’s a lead? Men who message her are her leads; conversions will be securing dates with said leads.
Will Megan rate leads higher when they mention their families? How will musicians fare? Are vegetarians a hard-pass? Be sure to read her next post to find out!
Use Our Love Lessons Learned to Build the Landing Page of Your Dreams
We’ll be writing posts as the project progresses. We really have no idea how things are going to turn out: will Megan find Mr. Right? Who knows, but we might as well make the search interesting.
As for your landing pages, generating leads is a bit more of a science than finding the love of your life, and for that reason, there’s a lot you can learn from dating profiles to help improve your landing page.
So here we go…we’ll keep you posted.
Map Out a 300% Conversion Rate Increase
Conversion Marketing StrategyIn January a large property listing website announced they’d increased conversions by 300%. They’d significantly changed the site’s design and the way they searched for properties, delivering results by travel time rather than miles radius.
In March a second property website announced a boost of 300% but this time no design change whatsoever. They started delivering results by travel time, and that was the only change they made. Timing was everything.
Why does providing travel time boost conversions?
As with any conversion boost, it’s down to optimizing consumer experience. The search results were more relevant, but why?
Personalization: the key to transforming conversion rates
We already know that personalization is key whether you’re composing an email campaign or doing post-sales follow-ups. Where’s the personalization in location? Personalization is nothing without people, which is the downfall of a distance search. A mile “as the crow flies” isn’t relevant if the crow is on a bus or in a car.
Acknowledging infrastructure networks transforms a circle into a polygon. This polygon changes shape depending on the surrounding location’s network. Local search results that use a polygon model will eliminate all the erroneous results that would have been delivered in a miles radius search.
Search result with radius model
Map acknowledging transportation networks
Search result with polygon model
Sorry, I’m running 5 miles late
A mile is not a human metric: we do everything by time. We need to arrive at locations on time, leave on time, spend time at locations or visit several places in an allotted time. The problem is that one mile can take five minutes or one hour depending on congestion, infrastructure and other factors.
Tell a hungry person their favorite restaurant is ten minutes away, and they know exactly what you mean. Tell them it’s a mile away, and they will need to know a lot more. Using time in local searching makes the results relevant and understandable. When the amount of consumer leg-work is reduced, they’re more likely to decide there and then.
Time to personalize
People search for location-specific results because they need to get there. Websites that use minutes instead of miles can ask two simple questions that will personalize each search so that no one will ever need to work out “will this work for me?”
Give it the time of day
This information alters the relevant results for three reasons.
Some locations will always operate at the same time of day. Lunch reservations will always be in the same time window. Property searches may always use 9:00 am because the majority of people commute from home to work at that time.
Other sites may choose to automate the time function so that the visitor sees what is possible at the time of their search. This is useful if the site visitor wants to get there immediately, giving accurate results quickly.
Timely transport
The four polygons show different results for different transportation modes within 30 minutes. You can see that walkers can’t cover as much distance as drivers (obviously!). Adjusting for the exact mode of transportation ensures that every location result is reachable and removes any errors covered in distance searching.
Cycling
Public transportation
Driving
Walking
Case Studies:
Restaurant listing site OpenTable lets customers book tables so that they can reach their restaurant reservation within minutes.
The travel time to a restaurant changes by mode of transportation.
UK national tourism agency VisitBritain lets tourists plan their day based on what’s near their attraction of choice.
Planning your day by travel times.
The UK’s largest real estate agency group Countrywide lets property seekers pick how long they want their commute to be when listing new homes.
Coutrywide lets visitors shop for homes by commute time.
Time is mobile
With four out of five local searches on mobile devices ending with a purchase, marketers need to leverage their apps to ensure that they’re catering to the ever-moving consumer. Consumers can pick their search point or use mobile location searches to search by minutes from their current point.
Travel time search results on mobile device
Whose marketing efforts will benefit most from travel time search results?
It’s about time…I wrapped things up
Searching for locations by time delivers more accurate results. Consumers like it and convert.About the Author
Louisa is head of marketing at iGeolise.com. The company is the creator of the TravelTime Platform, an API that allows websites to search, rank, sort and display location results by minutes rather than miles. She’s cuckoo for conversions – particularly if they have to do with local search. To find out more follow them on Twitter @iGeolise or go to www.gettraveltime.com.
Going Mobile for Mobile Conversions [Hello Chicago]
News & EventsIf you live in Chicago, we’re bringing one of our most important presentations right to you.
If you don’t live in Chicago, may I suggest you get that Ford Fairlane lubed and tuned up for a road trip. You’ll want to be there on June 2.
We’re going mobile to spread the results of our testing on the mobile web. It’s one of the most important presentations we’ve done because the mobile web is changing fast.
Conversion Sciences is Road Tripping to Chicago June 2.
We know a thing or two about your mobile marketing. Your Mobile traffic is probably one of your fastest growing segments. It converts at depressingly low rates. You have probably decided to focus your efforts on the desktop for now.
We were there once, too.
Come see the most interesting and lucrative things we’ve learned about mobile conversions from tests across industries. You’ll learn you how to avoid common conversion-killing “mobile best practices”, write CTAs that get mobile visitors to take action and employ simple UX tricks that will keep those CTAs constant without distracting or irritating visitors.
You’ll also get tips for bridging the 1st screen to 2nd screen gap, maximizing phone leads from mobile visitors and building forms that mobile visitors will actually complete.
You’ll leave this sessions equipped to make smarter decisions about your mobile experience.
We Get a Special Discount
We get a special discount since we’ve got the awesome wheels. Don’t tell our hosts at Unbounce that we’re sharing this code with you.
conversionsciencessentme
You better sign up before they get wise. This code lets you in the door for $149.50. That’s 50% off the already ridiculous price. You can use it here. Yes, it’s a damn long discount code. Copy it to your clipboard.
Did I Mention the Other Seven Awesome Speakers?
No? Well you can’t beat them. You should check them out after you’ve registered to see us.
We’re worth the $149.50 admission, but you also get these bright people.
Come see us in Chicago, or wait to see these great speakers at one of the overblown and expensive conferences in some far away city. Your choice.
See Me at Conversion World and Keep Your Pajamas On
News & EventsThere’s a formula for your landing pages that guide you to to get the reaction you’re aiming for. You’re paying for the traffic: now’s your chance to get the most from it.
The first ever online C
RO conference is fast-approaching, and if you want that critical formula for high-converting landing pages (and of course you do), request an invite to the Conversion World Conference happening April 20-22.You’ll never be able to learn from a more diverse, interesting and knowledgeable group of international conversion experts. Ever.
You don’t even have to change out of your pajamas. It’s all online. Invite some of your geeky friends over. Pop popcorn. Invent a Conversion World drinking game.
For my part, I’ll be sharing my landing page formula. You’ll get actionable tips and best practices to create the result-driven landing pages you need. I’ll also review several of your landing pages live and make suggestions on changes and improvements that will have an immediate impact.
What You’ll Learn
Register for this three day extravaganza of conversion optimization goodness without leaving your computer.
Unalytics: Unconventional Analytics to Guide Your Decisions
Conversion Marketing StrategyWhat kind of person is “good” at analytics? It’s time to change our opinion of what a “data scientist” is. If you are involved in the care and feeding of an online marketing endeavor, you have to be good at this “data thing.”
Fortunately, this doesn’t mean that you put on your lab coat and pocket protector and spend endless hours combing through data, charts and spreadsheets.
That IS the job of the data scientist. No, you are more of a data detective, finding data to guide your decisions in unexpected places.
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Check out the podcast or column for the full list.
Austin is the Conversion Capital of the World in 2015
News & EventsLast year, Conversion Sciences and I teamed up to prove that Austin, Texas, is the Conversion Capital of the World.
While some may disagree, evidence still points to this unique claim to fame for the capital city of Texas.
For those who aren’t sure where Austin is, we’re providing a map.
Conversion Optimization Experts and Austin: Weirdly Connected
At first glance, conversion optimizers can seem like an elite group. Even for marketers who know they should be testing, the practice of hypothesizing and measuring feels like it should be reserved for brainy number-nerds.
But if you look closely, there’s an incredible diversity among conversion experts.
True, some of them were doing advanced calculations before most of us could count, but many got their start in unlikely places: advertising, SEO and even the golf course.
What’s most interesting is that they seem to be drawn to this one location: a cluster of entrepreneurial, music-loving, taco-eating, results-oriented marketers.
Noah Kagan, a transplant from the Silicon Valley explains the phenomenon in this TechCrunch video. He says people come to visit and realize, “Wow! This is a great culture: good lifestyle, affordable, the people are friendly… .”
That explains why they’re drawn here, but one of the reasons they stay (and flourish) is the very thing that makes Austin unique.
The city’s tag line is “Keep Austin weird.” Its hallmark: diversity. This is a place that rewards creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. So it’s the perfect place for smart people to make their mark and still enjoy life.
“In Austin, we wanna have lives,” says Noah. And apparently, a lot of smart conversion optimizers would echo that sentiment.
Like it or not, agree or not, Austin has become prime real estate for conversion rate optimizers. Last year, we asked local experts “why Austin?” This year, we decided to get a little more personal.
Here’s what they told us.
Brian Massey
Conversion Sciences | @bmassey
I was trained as a computer scientist, and wound my way through sales and into marketing. Through this journey, data-driven marketing came pretty naturally to me. I was a marketer with a scientist’s training. I wasn’t going to settle for guessing about what worked on the Web.
In 2001 I wrote my own analytics package, which I think you can still find on SourceForge.net. However, my employers didn’t really know what to make of the marketing guy who was spending his time coding. At the time, there wasn’t a word or a discipline or an industry for what I was doing. I had a hard time describing the method to my madness.
It was a “Wizards of the Web” seminar by Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg (see below) that sealed it for me. They showed me how science and marketing could work as one.
In 2007, I started Conversion Sciences and began teaching the world about this new set of disciplines. Many businesses get it now, and we have been having a lot of fun understanding crazy people they call their visitors.
How does Austin play into this? Aside from the unusual business school, the Wizard Academy here, Austin has the “Creative Class” we need to make websites awesome. When you combine low cost of living with high-value talent, it’s a great place to run a conversion optimization company.
Joel Harvey
Conversion Sciences | @JoelJHarvey
My first experience with using data to make money came when I was ten years old.
by understanding the relationship of those statistics and the market value of a particular player or card and leveraging that knowledge in trade negotiations with other collectors.
There was nothing more thrilling than using insights from data to engage in a profitable trade. By the time I lost interest in sports cards (about three years later), I had turned several hundred dollars into a collection worth several thousand dollars.
I was hooked.
A handful of years later I started building and monetizing websites. This was before Google Website Optimizer or any early A/B testing tools, but I knew that in order to maximize profits, I would need to try different types of content.
Essentially that meant running pre/post tests and keeping a sharp eye on the bottom line to see if it was moving in the right direction. I quickly realized how powerful (and profitable) even small changes to a page could be and have been hooked on optimization ever since.
How Austin plays into this: About eight years ago my digital marketing career was really starting to blossom. However, I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time and found that there was a lack of mentors, collaborators and overall talent for me to tap into. I needed to move somewhere that had a thriving digital ecosystem and, after deep analysis, Austin topped the list. I haven’t looked back since.
Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg
Buyer Legends, IdealSpot | @JeffreyGroks, @TheGrok
After almost two decades in the CRO game, we moved to Austin, the city whose businesses live by the slogan “Keep Austin Weird”. The move turned out to be a catalyst for many positive changes, personally and professionally.
Austin has truly become the CRO capital of the world. It is full of brilliant CRO practitioners. Over beers a few years ago, our colleagues inspired us to look for a better solution to shared frustrations.
“Keep Austin Weird” had been started to promote local businesses, those who deeply understand and strive to delight Austin’s population. These businesses are fiercely committed to succeed despite the advantages offered by the homogeneity of large national chains.
Bryan and I have worked together with a prestigious list of blue-chip clients to achieve well over $2 Billion in CRO wins. We have trained thousands of people in CRO and written several books, including two New York Times best sellers about CRO.
Nevertheless we share the frustration that CRO, as too many companies practice it today, is a dead end.
It was in Austin that we shifted our focus away from traditional CRO. We pioneered CRO as a study of tactics to increase conversions. Unlike “Keep Austin Weird,” our early efforts lacked the “soul” of marketing, which we later identified—
In the past we trained and encouraged clients to become experts in many of the CRO disciplines. They got great results! The trouble was, no single siloed discipline was a decisive factor in consistently achieving better results.
We reflected on our nearly twenty years of CRO work. Some companies effortlessly adopted a culture of optimization. Others achieved wins but failed to absorb the lessons learned. Their CRO efforts were after-the-fact fixes; the dead end of many of today’s traditional CRO efforts.
Those companies that excelled evolved a culture of customer-centricity—not at the manager or director level, but in the C-suite. The best companies absorbed CRO learnings and incorporated them into operational changes. That made them superior, not just at fixing, but at creating relevant customer experiences, including marketing campaigns, customer flows and meaningful content.
One of the privileges of working through CRO challenges with diverse organizations over the years was learning that no matter the industry, business size or product, the only story that truly matters is the story that your delighted customers tell about your company—not the one you tell your customer.
We started BuyerLegends.com in the great weird city of Austin to help companies learn how to use the soulful art of storytelling to create customer-centered, data-driven customer experience design, supported by the only story that matters.
Peep Laja
ConversionXL | @peeplaja
I used to run an SEO agency. When I got my clients to rank #1 for a number of keywords—which, by the way, wasn’t very hard in 2007—I noticed they weren’t necessarily making more money.
That was clue #1.
Then I did a bunch of direct response marketing for information products.
That was clue #2.
My last SaaS startup failed, I ran out of ideas, and didn’t have a structured process to grow the business. I felt there must be a better way to build businesses. That’s when I discovered Lean Startup.
That was clue #3.
While all of that was taking place, I fell in love with a girl from Austin and ended up moving here. When I started to self-identify as a conversion guy (~2011), I noticed I was surrounded by others who do the same. Total coincidence.
Brett Hurt
Bazaarvoice, Coremetrics | @bazaarbrett
My parents were retailers from the time I was born, and my dad was a direct marketer and inventor of the first halogen fishing light. I grew up working in my parents’ store. I also grew up as a programmer, starting at age 7 and programming over 40 hours a week from age 7 to 21.
In 1998, my wife and I launched an online retailer named BodyMatrix, leveraging an eCommerce platform that I had built from scratch over the summer (in between school years at Wharton, where I was earning my MBA). We were thrilled to be getting orders all over the world, from US military bases to the UK.
But we were flying blind. Working in my parent’s stores and helping my dad market his products had gotten me used to understanding customer behavior. I had written my Wharton leadership study on Sam Walton, based on his book Made in America. A key part of Walmart’s early success was understanding customer behavior in their stores.
With all of the advantages of the Internet, it had a huge disadvantage: You couldn’t see anything.
So
As a student, I couldn’t afford to buy one and the cheap ones (like WebTrends) were very poor, offering only high-level page view counts. I needed to know what was happening within our online store—to at least recreate what I knew about our customers at my parents’ stores.
The lightbulb moment came when I realized I could know even more.
I told my parents how my wife and I had developed the “biggest brain” with the ability to remember all customer behavior. And it worked—we almost doubled our conversion ratio (from 2% to 3.8%) in three months.
This attracted the attention of a PhD student at Wharton who formed his dissertation on the data we had collected and how we could personalize based on it.
I thought this was novel, but I didn’t know how novel it really was. I went to friends, Wharton grads who worked at CDnow and Amazon. To my shock, they urged me to form a business around this.
That’s how Coremetrics was born. I sold my other businesses, including my Web consulting business and BodyMatrix, and put all of my chips on Coremetrics.
We moved the business to Austin, where I was able to attract many fantastic developers, product managers, and client services personnel. We built a global company, became an industry standard in retail, and today IBM owns the company and bases its popular holiday retail benchmarking reports off the foundation of Coremetrics’ analytics and data.
Roger Dooley
NeuroScience Marketing | @rogerdooley
I was a data-driven marketer and entrepreneur long before the Internet was popular.
In the early days of home computers, I left a senior strategy position at a Fortune 1000 company and co-founded a catalog business. We did things like square-inch analysis to evaluate products and their positioning, A/B testing to measure the effect of different cover designs, and more. We even did predictive modeling for our call center.
Later, I transitioned to the digital space with a focus on SEO, community building, and conversion. My focus on both quantitative metrics and human behavior helped me build College Confidential, which generates tens of millions of page views per month and ranks as the busiest college-bound website.
Austin is a great place to work from—there’s a huge tech community, lots of entrepreneurism, and a world-class university. On the non-business side, there’s no snow to shovel, the restaurant and music scenes are diverse, and the breakfast tacos are amazing!
Yuan Wright
Electronic Arts (EA)
I started my career in investment banking and corporate finance. By luck, I was at a large corporation, where you can easily move to different departments. I landed in digital analytics and never looked back!
Immediately, I realized this was what I was made to do. In traditional offline marketing, it’s hard to optimize conversions. But in digital marketing, you have the tools and technology to see the big picture and understand the entire ecosystem of how you’re interacting with the customer.
Every click, every transaction helps you understand the customer better. It’s also very concrete. A/B testing, for example, only has 3 outcomes: you help business, you don’t help business, or it doesn’t matter. The numbers tell you everything and enable you to make solid business decisions.
At EA, I use data to understand how we can optimize the multi-channel platforms to support customers through their entire life cycle: acquisition, conversion, growth and support. The goal? A frictionless journey along the way
It’s hard to imagine doing this anywhere but Austin. This truly is the Conversion Capital of the World. It’s a digital hub that attracts top tech folks, and it offers culture, diversity, and opportunities for intelligent exchange. I love it, and I’m honored to be here.
Neil Iscoe
Digital Certainty | @DCertainty
As CEO of Digital Certainty (now Sentient Ascend), I help businesses stay creative by providing a system that does the hard work of optimizing their landing pages for them. Digital Certainty helps marketers become more productive by using machine-learning to more quickly produce better results.
I’ve been in Austin a long time, receiving my PhD in Computer Sciences from UT in 1985, creating a product development lab for HP and, prior to founding Digital Certainty, being responsible for commercializing the results of the $550M of annual research performed by the University of Texas.
I’ve always been interested in data, but I realized its power when I was in graduate school.
So I attended a summer program at the University of Michigan, the home of survey sampling, and it evolved from there.
That was a really long time ago, but data is still at the core of what we do. It’s such a cool area, where you can use data to bring about real results.
Austin’s diverse talent base dovetails with the multi-disciplinary nature of CRO. Austin’s energy, rather than producing multitudes of largely indistinguishable apps, is like CRO: focused on results.
There’s remarkable unanimity of purpose and support. Technology companies can take advantage of an active ecosystem that includes incubators, city council, university, SXSW, chamber of commerce, and multiple support organizations.
And, of course, we’ve got the best breakfast tacos in the world.
Kate Morris
Outspoken Media | @katemorris
Data-driven marketing was something I was interested in when I started at the University of Texas. I got my BBA in Marketing and my specialization (via electives) in Customer Relationship Management. It’s similar to what I ended up in, but the online world was just getting going at that time.
Even then, though, I could see that having the data to back up plans of growth was imperative. I got into the online marketing world and have not looked back.
It’s an industry built on data and measurement. It was so great to learn that online marketing could do what marketers had such a hard time with in the past: measure impact. It’s still not perfect by any means, but
I spent 4 years in Seattle, but my home has always been here. The Austin community is so supportive—and rooted in data, conversations, and development. We have some of the best conversion-based minds, and I am proud to call some of them friends.
Kenneth Cho
People Pattern | @chonuff
Prior to People Pattern, I founded a company called Spredfast, a social media management platform for the enterprise.
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas approached us to integrate social media into an awareness campaign for an Edgar Allen Poe exhibit. We initially targeted traditional literary societies and book clubs around central Texas, but I came to notice a large segment of high school girls—more specifically “Goth” girls—leading the conversation.
I suggested the HRC target ads at Facebook followers of Goth bands—and foot traffic to the exhibition tripled.
I started to recognize a shift in importance from understanding the conversation to understanding who is behind the conversation and teamed up with UT Professor of Computational Linguistics Jason Baldridge to found People Pattern.
People Pattern is a SaaS platform that helps brands identify and activate psychographic segments via semi-supervised machine learning and natural language processing. There is no longer an alternative to data-driven marketing. Understanding existing and desired customers through brand data is paramount for marketers.
The combination of digital marketing software companies and the University of Texas makes Austin a hotbed of technology and up-and-coming talent, and hiring the best and brightest to uncover and scale audience insights will enable our platform to maintain its competitive edge.
Leslie Mock
Idea Pioneer Media, TheInnerpreneur | @LeslieMock
Launching one of the first public online colleges tossed me headlong into online marketing. Filling classes was crucial and new tools like email marketing became an amazing way to run campaigns, easily track what was happening and tweak things to get better and better results.
Cool. No more months of creating print ads and wondering if anyone ever saw them.
I then spearheaded online marketing for other businesses and organizations—
by shifting to data-driven marketing. No more “marketing to everyone and hoping it works”.
Along the way, I started a natural product line, an ecommerce business, and a media company that works with clients to get great marketing results by funneling their big vision into measurable outcomes: All possible because of the magic of data-driven marketing.
(I’m also an introverted entrepreneur and started a community to share tips and advice. You can join us at TheInnerpreneur on Facebook).
Austin is the home to SXSW Interactive, a plethora of entrepreneurs and creative start-ups. The best data-driven marketers live here and so do I. How lucky is that?
Ethan Luke Stenis
Street Authority | @elstenis
I was drawn to Austin for the reputable advertising graduate program at the University of Texas, but I stayed for the music scene and food trucks.
Upon graduation, I burst out of UT Advertising graduate program with the ambitious goal of making Super Bowl commercials by the dozen, but once I experienced the traditional ad agency life, I realized it wasn’t my style.
I knew data-driven marketing was important once I began working as a direct response copywriter at an Austin digital marketing agency. Using SEO/SEM best practices and a dynamic analytical toolbox, I learned how to create actionable copy, track and interpret traffic stats, increase engagement, and optimize conversion rates.
It was a warm, sunny morning, and I was drinking some rich, Colombian coffee when it hit me:
Once I cleaned up the coffee I spit out and apologized to the rest of the meeting members for the unexplained interruption, I smiled to myself, re-calibrated my career goals, and began down the road to mastering all that is data.
Jane Dueease
Univar Environmental Services | @techjane
You have a lot of time to think when you are a beer cart girl. And I thought a lot about how to make more $$ from my customers.
There are only 18 holes on a golf course, and each team can have a max of 8 people at a time. It takes 4 hours on average to play a round of golf, so for an 8-hour shift on the course, I maxed out at 288 customers.
That sounds like a lot. But most golfers are not drinking beer and they can only drink so many sodas. Worse, they would often stop and go to the bathroom after the first nine and grab a drink/snack at the bar, leaving me with less money. So I had to create ways to fix this.
I got approval to bring liquor onto the beer cart, along with fresh sandwiches, hot coffee, hot chocolate, better snacks and sweets. I tried everything! Each change I would document and report back to the GM.
Again I had a lot of time on my hands.
Then I started to personalize my cart based on who was playing that day. Over time I got to know each members’ needs and wants, and I’d add Coors Light for Mr. Smith or 16-ounce cans of Miller Lite for Mr. Jones.
Each change, each customer, I documented as well as my earnings. I got my GM to pull beer cart sales from the prior year—and that’s when I learned that I had tripled the sales from the prior year.
My little “book” became my bible—even the pro’s wanted in. I kept more data on their customers than they did. I loved it.
I made more money, my customers were happy, my boss was happy and I knew what everyone wanted.
I think about those days, circling the course again and again, and the data (customers) sitting right in front of me all the time. It is why I love data today. Some of it is so simple yet so powerful.
I pulled basic sales data from a recent ecommerce customer: a simple heat map of sales by day of the week, and time of day. I wanted to know what their best-selling day and time was. As it turns out, 25% of their sales came on Sunday from 5 to midnight. Guess when they took the site down for maintenance/ upgrades/ launches?
Yep. On Sunday nights after 9 pm.
After presenting the data, we moved the maintenance windows to 6 am–10 am on Monday, our slowest sales day and time. Everyone was happier—especially the IT folks who got to launch during normal business hours.
Data is powerful. It tells you what your customers want (Coors Light), when they want it (Sunday nights) and so much more. Through testing, you can take opinion (the VP loves blue buy buttons) out of the equation and replace it with what the customers want (green buy buttons), turning marketing into the sales machine is should be.
Now how does Austin fit into this? I moved to Austin because I wanted to be back in Texas (I’m from Houston originally), and it was the only city I wanted to live in. Austin is the perfect location because it is such a cutting edge blend of IT, Entrepreneurs, and the universities.
Conversion as a science (vs. personal opinion) is only now gaining traction. Austin is open to it because it loves all things weird, and some of the lessons learned from looking at conversion data are weird. Just like Austin.
Kevin Koym
Tech Ranch Austin | @kkoym
I founded Tech Ranch in 2008 on the idea that I could provide incubation education to entrepreneurs by focusing on the individuals instead of the startup itself.
Prior to that, I had learned that there was a gap in the market and used market-driven data to discover where the “sweet spot” would exist for a new company. I learned that entrepreneurs could easily exchange equity for dollars, but that didn’t help them improve themselves or their prospects for success after exciting their current venture.
My team and I realized that Austin was the perfect place to marry the desire to focus on the triple bottom line while still helping pioneers impact global change. Austin provides a unique community that supports all industries and works together to help startups reach their goals. Seasoned successes are always willing to share their data and experience with those new to the scene.
Therefore, as we continue to educate entrepreneurs, we help them realize that by using data—driven by research and market insights—they can avoid “reinventing the wheel”. We encourage the use of both secondary and primary research to help them narrow down their target marketing, position themselves against the competition and prepare for investor due diligence.
Mani Iyer
Kwanzoo | @iyermani
I’m a serial entrepreneur, startup advisor, and industry speaker on demand generation, pipeline acceleration, cross-channel marketing, B2B marketing and advertising. I’ve spoken at leading industry conferences including Ad-Tech, Leadscon, Conversion Conference, Online Marketing Summit, DemandCon, TiECon, and Startup Summit. Before that, I was a marketing consultant to VC-backed start-ups and founded a software business acquired by Oracle/PeopleSoft.
Now, as CEO of Kwanzoo, a cloud-based platform for full-funnel retargeting and personalized display campaigns, it really gets me when marketers don’t do their homework, throwing out yet another “off message,” irrelevant ad in that fleeting moment when they finally have someone’s attention.
This just has to change!
Life is too short. And it’s moving faster every day. There are better ways to spend our time, both at home and at work.
That’s why I love data-driven marketing. It’s the only thing that can propel that change.
Why Austin?
Gartner says CMOs will soon overtake CIOs in the enterprise. Foundation Capital, a leading Bay Area VC firm predicts a 10X growth in marketing technology over the next 10 years. Here at Kwanzoo, we were convinced we needed to look beyond Silicon Valley as we grew our Customer Success, Sales and Marketing teams.
With its lower costs, high quality of life, music, culture, outdoors, the UT system and more, it’s been a great move for us. We are thrilled to be a part of the vibrant Austin technology and entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Charles Hua
RetailMeNot.com | @charleschenhua
I didn’t start out my career as a marketer. As an engineer, I always thought marketers were a bunch of party animals, that a quants person like me would not fit in with that crowd.
It wasn’t until I joined the CRM group at Dell’s Austin headquarters that
I started out testing covers, formats and paper thickness when I was at the direct marketing department at Dell.
That’s the point at which I learned marketing is actually about numbers as much as about gut feelings and creativity. The digital revolution really sped up this process of experimentation. It provides much richer data sets, segmentation and personalization, providing all kinds possibilities to respond to our customers.
Even if I weren’t a number-nerd, I’d tell you data-driven decision-making through experimentation is the key to gain a competitive edge.
Austin matters to me primarily because it’s my home. I graduated from UT and have lived here ever since. Who wouldn’t want to? The food is awesome.
Justin Rondeau
DigitalMarketer | @Jtrondeau
On a January morning early in my career as a marketer in software, the CEO of the company told me that I needed to increase revenues. I asked “How?”, and
Kind of a bummer statement, especially since I had very little control over the website at the time.
We had a fairly large, but unresponsive email list, so I dug through the data to develop a new campaign and split tested along the way. I presented my findings, and this gave me the chance to start optimizing the website—the place that was originally off limits to me!
Data was the key to growing my career, and every campaign I created made it easy to point to the causal relationship between the changes we made and the revenues we gained.
I was hooked and never looked back.
I’m not a full-time Austinite yet—I come down from Boston for a week each month, so it is really my second home (Austin… Boston… they even sound alike). But I feel completely at home here. I love the food, my team at DM, the music, and the impromptu conversion meetups at local bars with some of the best in the industry.
Chris Mercer
Seriously Simple Marketing | @mercertweets
As co-owner of Seriously Simple Marketing, I work with top direct response marketers from around the world, improving revenues as they optimize funnel by funnel.
I knew the data-driven approach was for me when I realized just how much Google Analytics could bring to the table.
There is a disconnect for most marketers between the ‘out-of-the-box’ Google Analytics default install and what’s actually possible once you know how to set it up properly. When I learned how to do that, it opened up a whole new world!
I’ve been helping to spread the word to other optimizers ever since and recently created a course (called Seriously Simple Analytics) to help marketers use tools like Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager properly, so they can move from “guessing what works” to “measuring what works”.
Why Austin? We’ve lived in places like San Diego, Portland, Seattle and New York… but nothing beats Austin!
, are just some of the things that first drew my wife and me to this incredible city.
We now call Austin home because of the incredible group of talented people we’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with. There’s just nothing like it. (Wait… did I mention the microbrews?!?)
Craig Tomlin
WCT & Associates | @ctomlin
With 20 years of experience on both the client-side and the agency-side, I’ve grown revenue for firms like BlackBerry, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Disney, and IBM.
I learned that data-driven marketing was important while an Account Director at a local agency, where analytics and engagement data coupled with behavioral data from usability testing allowed me to grow client revenue by 300% for key accounts. It probably also helped win two Marketo Revvies and a Killer Content Award from Content Marketing Institute.
— coupled with the behavioral data coming from usability testing, that made the big difference. Using both gave a much clearer picture, not only of what was happening on a website, but why it was happening.
Armed with that intelligence, it’s easy to formulate entirely new hypotheses for testing, using an A/B approach that can be far more effective, giving much bigger increases in conversion.
Why Austin?
I moved here from Southern California at the height of the recession because I had three job offers in Texas: one in Houston, one in San Antonio and one in Austin. After visiting all three, it was apparent that, with its small yet dynamic and entrepreneurial atmosphere, it’s hill country with lakes all around, and the exceptional schools for my family—Austin was the best place for us.
And with over 100 people moving to Austin every day I guess I’m not alone in that decision!
Austin, the perfect environment for CROs
If you always thought conversion rate optimization was only for number-nerds, I hope you’re convinced otherwise. Sure, there’s a lot of data that goes into the process, but there’s another side to the optimization game.
Several of our experts commented on the “other” side of data—meeting the needs of their best customers. The Eisenbergs went so far as to call this the “soul” of marketing.
[ The data simply helps them improve their ability to connect with those people—even to the point of delighting them.
Perhaps that’s why other tech or marketing centers aren’t measuring up to Austin. Here, you have the cultural diversity and creativity to bring data and people together.
Sure, Austin is a cluster of conversion optimizers. But here, they also have a life.
Mobile Web 1.0: Party Like It's 1999
Conversion-Centered DesignWe’ve come a long way, baby. This is one of my first web pages, from 1998.
Soft Reality Home Page from 1998. It was Web 1.0.
This was Web 1.0. Looking back, we have to cringe. But guess what: we’re in Mobile Web 1.0 and it feels like 1998 all over again.
In 1998, Web 1.0 was on the verge of becoming Web 2.0, which fueled a bubble that would bring stock markets down and rearrange the tech landscape.
Is Mobile Web 1.0 Like Web 1.0?
Mobile Web 1.0 may not have such a violent transition, but what we’re learning from testing mobile optimized websites is that we will look back at Mobile Web 1.0 and cringe, just like when we look at Web 1.0 sites.
What are we doing with the mobile web that are the equivalents of blinking text, myriad fonts and crazy background patterns?
Conversion Scientist Joel Harvey will attempt to answer some of those questions in his Conversion Conference presentation Mobile Optimization Essentials.
He’s going to reviewing several of the tests we’ve performed here at Conversion Sciences and let you in on how Mobile Web 2.0 is shaping up.
This won’t be some humdrum presentation either. Joel is one of the highest rated speakers at Conversion Conference, and he has the badge to prove it.
43 Reasons to Attend Conversion Conference
If Joel’s presentation wasn’t enough, you’ll learn from and meet speakers doing 43 sessions covering all aspects of online conversion.
And the list goes on and on. It’s a complete dose of getting more revenue from the audience you already have.
Save $100 with Code JOEL100
Because we have sway with the organizers of Conversion Conference, we can get you a sweet deal on the price of a ticket: $100 off.
Conversion Conference is just around the corner – only a month away. By mid-May, you’ll have a new perspective on how to make online marketing hum for your business.
And it’s in Las Vegas.
Tickets are going fast. Grab your ticket soon before they sell out. Don’t forget to use your discount code: JOEL100.
Austin Has The Highest Number of Website Optimizers per Capita
News & EventsLast year, Austin, Texas declared itself the Conversion Capital of the World with some stiff competition.
Clearly, the quality of breakfast tacos and microbrews are determining factors for how optimizers choose their city of residence.It turns out that, this year there is even more reason to support this very scientific and not-at-all-biased claim. We’ll be sharing our updated list of Austintatious website optimization pros on CRO Day, April 9.
Website optimizers aren’t your typical marketer. In our roundup, each one will tell the story of how they were drawn, pulled or tricked into conversion optimization.
Subscribe to The Conversion Scientist. Don’t miss this Ausome list.
Ironically, CRO Day was declared by the crew at Unbounce, a respected but decidedly “ain’t in Austin” company. Despite that, we think that you should be online for this event. We will participate.
breakfast tacos by goodiesfirst via Compfight cc and adapted for this post