Last week I had the pleasure of attending Conversion Conference, a conference focusing entirely on conversion optimization. A big thanks to Tim Ash for putting the conference together (getting a conference going from scratch can’t be easy) and here are 3 high-level themes from the conference (also read Scott Brinker’s 3 big picture marketing themes post that inspired my post):
Conversion Conference Takeaways
- Conversion Optimization isn’t hard – Regardless of how complex your website may be, there are lots of tools out there to make testing easy. Google Website Optimizer is free, will auto-prune poor performing pages (in MVT tests) and generates PDF reports that you can deliver to execs or clients. And don’t think that because it’s free it can’t handle the load, GWO was used to test the homepage of YouTube, all 1024 possible page variations and the millions of visits.
- Conversion Optimization isn’t new – Brooks Bell talked about how she was helping AOL with split testing over 8 years ago. Direct mail has been doing it for years before that. Conversion optimization may be the hot topic in internet marketing, but it isn’t as new as some people think.
- If in doubt…test it – Each site is different, so most questions about what will work/won’t work on your site will start with “It depends…” and end with “…test it.” The key is to actually DO IT! Don’t get caught by decision paralysis. Don’t have meeting about it and talk about it and get stuck in the technical deployment of it. DO IT!
These were 3 themes that I pulled from the conference, but there was a lot more good stuff. Keep an eye on my blog this week for more, follow this Twitter list of Conversion Conference attendees, or read Daniel Sevitt’s first thoughts post.
