The Conversion Conference was held at the Business Design Center in Islington from Dec 30th – Dec 1st. The venue also hosted 3 other conferences the ‘Marketing Optimization Summit’, ‘Predictive Analytics World’ and ‘ecmod2011′ as part of the ‘Data Driven Business Week’ 2011.

An impressive line up of Speakers for Day 1 (2 tracks) included:

• Keynote Speech by Bryan Eisenberg – Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimiser
• Keynote Speech by Amy Africa – Mobile & Real Time Optimisation
• Guy Levine – Turbo-Charging PPC & Display Ad Landing Pages
• Karl Blanks – The Science of Split and Multivariate Testing
• Richard /Patrick Altoft – SEO and SEM vs. CRO – Tactics for Optimising Both Search & Conversion
• Craig Sullivan/Jeff Greenfield – Where is my Conversion? Conversion Tracking in a Multichannel World
• Charles Nicholls/Graham Cooke – Adaptive Content & Behavioural Targeting – Individual Websites for Bigger Potential
• Stephen Pavlovich/Paul Rouke – E-Commerce Best Practices
• Karl Blanks/Rob Jackson – Why won’t you buy? Finding and eliminating Conversion Blockers
• Scott Harmes/Susan Hallam – Video, Animation & Rich Media
• Panel Discussion – CRO, SEM & SEO – Find the synergies, find the potential! with Stephen Pavlovich, Patrick Altoft and Guy Levine

3 Great Sessions from #ConvCon

Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimiser - Bryan Eisenberg, Professional Speaker, Best Selling Author, Consultant

An outstanding keynote speech highlighting that with $56 Billion being spent on traffic generation, conversion rates are not that different to where they were 10 years ago (2-3%). When we’ve had all these years to improve, more people spending their money online, more people comfortable spending, faster servers, better design, better tools and analytics, the question is why are conversion rates not going up?

Suggesting the idea that if 98% of people that walked into your offline store walked out, you would close your doors in a short space of time. Conversion and traffic flow is a major problem in todays marketplace and most websites in the world have a conversion problem. If you are not convinced that things have not improved, watch ‘Sell or Else’ from David Ogilvy, a spooky but spot on insight from 60 years ago:

Takeaways:
* The job of conversion is to give a ‘to do’ list – not a report
* Don’t do slice and dice optimisation it is a pointless waste of everyone’s time
* Cool Free Tools for CRO Cool for FREE – http://bo.lt/ – http://btbuckets.com/
* Cool Tools not for free! http://monetate.com/
* Psychological profiling / Personas lifts conversion rates
* 3 key part to optimisation – tools, people, process
* The money is still in the list – focus back on email (acquisition as high as 1000%)

This is not the exact slide – but it’s pretty close – http://www.slideshare.net/cgeorgeou/ses-conversion-tool-box-eisenberg

See the slice and dice example – http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/2011/05/testing-landing-pages/

Where is my Conversion? Conversion Tracking in a Multichannel World

Craig Sullivan, Group Customer Experience Manager, Belron @OptimiseOrDie

An advocate of testing free software before purchasing high cost alternatives, Craig’s session made AB testing entertaining and easy to understand. Having tested millions of pages there were a number of conversion winners and things to avoid when thinking about making changes to your website to drive sales and response.

Takeaways:
* You learn something from every test even if the conclusion is ‘that was a stupid test’
* AB Testing may be seasonal with different customers so you can’t necessarily test different months
* Don’t use stock images as they are not as trusted as ‘real’ photos – particularly not on hero shots
* When picking images, do not use negative body language, no arms crossed, no pointing, and don’t pick a group of people that look more like they will mug you than help with customer service, no ‘genital framing’ (!! who knew !!)
* What you hate personally vs what you do with your company marketing – try to align them
* Phone Tracking – use dynamic phone tracking by keyword, ad, organic using Google cookies

Craig is going to be putting up slides soon, so when they are available they can be found on his slideshare ID – http://www.slideshare.net/sullivac/presentations

Why won’t you buy? Finding and eliminating Conversion Blockers

Karl Blanks, Chairman, Conversion Rate Experts
Rob Jackson, Founder, Conversion Thursday UK

Are you guilty of conversion killer crimes? If you don’t know what is killing your conversion, you can’t fix the problem. I could listen to Karl Banks talking about conversion for hours so if you get the chance go see him!

16 conversion Killers

1. Not Split Testing
2. Meak Tweaking
3. Customer isn’t in Shopping Mode
4. Unclear Value Proposition
5. Lack of Trust
6. Lack of Interest
7. Confusion
8. Usability
9. Product-specific objections
10. Fatal Distraction
11. Don’t believe your company or product is any good
12. your competitor gets the sale
13. Too much perceived risk
14. Prospect defers decision
15. The merchant’s site is terrible
16. Bad Prior Experience

For a full breakdown – see the presentation – http://www.slideshare.net/a4uexpo/conversion-killing-mistakes-15-things-affiliates-still-arent-doing-in-2010-dr-karl-blanks-and-ben-jesson

Turbo-Charging PPC & Display Ad Landing Pages

Guy Levine, CEO, Return On Digital
Kai Radanitsch, eBusinessLab GmbH

This session conflicted with another session I attended, but there is a great presentation that can be found on Slideshare

http://www.slideshare.net/richardbaxterseo/seo-vs-cro-conversion-conference-london-2011

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Jackie Hole

Jackie Hole is an independant Search Marketing consultant for specialising in Paid Search, conversion improvement and organic search for the USA and Canadian markets. with over 12 years experience in online marketing. Jackie is Company Director of 22 Minds Ltd and Carnival Creative Ltd.

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