Conversion Conference West 2012 Session Descriptions

Are you ready to move beyond best practices? Conversion optimized design may seem complex, but once you're inside your user's head it all starts to make sense. This session will go "behind the tactics": We'll use simple, actionable examples to illustrate deeper user experience principles and the research methods you can use to customize the tactics to address your specific audience.

This is the session you've been asking for. You already know that running multivariate tests can help you improve the usability and effectiveness of your site, but where do you start? Join veteran technologist Eric J. Hansen as he maps out a plan that will help you prepare your website for testing, isolate the optimal pages, elements and variables for testing (hint: they are related to your key performance indicators!), determine the best methodology for data collection and analysis, implement sophisticated personalization and targeting techniques, and more. Learn the 5 errors you absolutely must avoid, along with the trade secrets of running an effective ongoing optimization program. Regardless of your experience level with multivariate testing, there's something for everyone in this session.

Wholly Guacamole raised their Facebook fan-base from 40,000 to over 275,000 fans in less then a year. Doing no advertising other than Facebook they saw their customer engagements measured in terms of posts, customer acquisitions, interaction with games, and site visits jump substantially. They were astounded when they saw their same store sales jump mirror the growth in facebook fans. Come hear about the fan acquision strategies that drove this growth, and get tips on how to measure the value of your own fans.

Want to know why people abandon your site? You'll laugh -- and cry -- at this collection of video clips from actual usability tests that show the common issues frustrating web users. Discover the most prevalant usability mistakes and how to avoid making them, and learn about a host of low-cost website feedback tools that you can use to uncover usability problems on your own site.

The web is turning from a text based medium to a video based medium – how are landing pages changing with video? Video is a powerful marketing tool that builds customer confidence and increases conversion rates. The amazing thing is that video has a postive effect on conversions whether it's watched or not. In other words, just adding product videos to your site will help you move the needle. In this session, you'll get 6 solid tips on how you can use video to improve your marketing efforts, as well as learn how to create a storyboard for your own conversion video. See real-life examples of organizations that have significantly increased their conversion rates by adding a video spokesperson and/or product video to their site, and hear how considerations such as gender, wardrobe, lighting and background can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your efforts.

Learn how to improve the conversion potential of your web landing pages by implementing persona-driven Use Cases based on understanding the prospect's motivations. Learn a powerful dual-framework model that includes a deep understanding of your prospect and his motivations, and scenarios that replicate the user's thought process as he attempts to accomplish his goal on your site. The result is a highly effective website that not only provides a better user experience but also delivers higher conversions.

Why do visitors abandon shopping carts? What are their motivations? What can we learn by segmenting abandoners based on behavior? How can email remarketing work to recover abandoned shopping carts? Drawing on new primary research which gives fascinating new insights into online buyer motivations, this presentation suggests practical techniques that can be applied to prevent abandonment and recover abandoned shopping carts.

Today's marketers have many layers of data that help them understand their customers and website visitors. In fact, the problem with most optimization programs isn't a lack of data, but the relevancy of it. In this session, you'll learn some simple yet powerful integrations that allow you to turn multiple data sets into a more meaningful, multi-dimensional picture of your customers of their lifecylce. You'll hear case studies and examples of how others have built integrations between data sources to learn more about their customers, remarket more effectively, personalize their messaging, and drive traffic to the most important pages on their sites. Your whole approach to optimization may change after you see how this strategy driven approach to leveraging the data sources you have can give you new ideas for maximizing short-term wins while building a foundation for greater long-term success.

Just like the average consumer, B2B purchasers want to cut through marketing hype to understand quickly how a company's products and services apply to them. High tech marketers are challenged to create online experiences that quickly establish a value proposition, differentiate their product/service from competitors, and ultimately generate qualified leads. Learn the key strategies that the most successful B2B digital marketers are adopting to increase conversions and accelerate their sales cycle. Learn firsthand how NetApp, a data storage and management provider, has built an internal culture focused on online optimization, and how ongoing testing and content targeting has lead to significant increases in onsite conversion and lead-generation.

Most businesses know they should be A/B testing their website but few actually do it on a regular basis. One of their biggest challenges is knowing what to test. In this talk Dan will share the best practices & lessons learned from working with over 10,000 users who have created more than 30,000 experiments using a dead-simple A/B testing tool called Optimizely. Dan will share key insights from these experiments and leave you inspired to start testing today.

If you are marketing to a global audience, do you tailor the web experience for visitors according to their culture? Important cultural drivers affect both conscious and unconscious customer preferences, and your "one size fits all" approach to global templating is probably costing your company a lot in terms of lost sales. Come hear how colors, navigation methods, image preferences and approaches to purchase can vary between cultural groups- even within a shared language. You'll see specific examples of organizations that have dramatically increased their global conversion rates by testing and tuning very granular elements of their site such as fonts, colors and even persuasion models to address the unique needs and preferences of different cultures.

Retailing has evolved immensely over the last 20 years, but many e-commerce sites have failed to translate those collective learnings to their online catalogs. Using real world retail stories in merchandising, space and category management, this session will demonstrate how these offline techniques can be applied to online retailing. Learn how to avoid the typical pitfalls in categorization, navigation and search results presentation that kill many ecommerce sites. How do you put the milk at the back of the online store? Does the most usable site sell the most? Get these answers and more in this compelling presentation - a must for anyone responsible for an online catalog site.

Know your landing page has problems, but don't know where to start? Here's your chance to get some free conversion advice from the experts. This session, always a Conversion Conference favorite, is fast-paced, unpredictable, and fun. Our conversion and usability experts will provide live, spontaneous assessments of attendee web sites, along with actionable advice on changes that could have an immediate impact on conversions. Whether you submit your site for review, or watch while your colleagues take the heat, there's no better way to see conversion best practices in action. You don't want to miss this session!.

Too often online retailers focus on how good their website looks, but put little effort into either customer usability or catalog optimization. Then, they are surprised when their beautiful website doesn't rank in the search engines and conversions are low. This session will identify common SEO mistakes when naming products and categories, identify usability issues that prevent customers from completing the sale, and how to fix the most common SEO and usability mistakes.

With site abandonment rates commonly as high as 98%, marketers are desperate for ways to move the conversion needle. Behaviorally targeted email and display remarketing campaigns present a massive opportunity to monetize site defectors and many organizations--not just ecommerce sites--are experiencing tremendous ROI. What are their secrets? Discover the best and worst practices in this brave new world, along with plenty of creative strategies to get started in remarketing right away.

The Intel support team wanted to understand who was coming to their website and what they were trying to accomplish. Where was the site succeeding and where was it failing? Come hear how they took a seemingly unmanageable volume of web analytics data and carved it into major and minor use case definitions. The use cases allowed the team to uncover three primary visitor actions, and two sub-categories of visitor attributes. By looking at pathing data and specific metrics for these use cases and attributes, clear recommendations for site improvement emerged. This session offers valuable advice and a specific action plan for anyone looking to better understand their site visitors and goals.

True conversion Ninjas know that optimization begins long before a visitor reaches your site. To really be effective with your PPC campaigns, you've got to understand the intent of the audience you are targeting. This session will give you a radical tool kit with which to evaluate the relevance, quality and conversion-likelihood quotient of inbound traffic aimed at the conversion funnel. You'll also learn how to identify your PPC conversion killers through a number of free and low-cost tools, and get a framework for interpreting your PPC analytics that will help you zero in on the specific keyword, ad copy, creative, or landing page that is killing your conversion rate.

Optimizing conversions is about more than just looking at landing page performance. Analysis and optimization of abandonment rates and conversion rates throughout the entire marketing system is the key to success. In this presentation, Big Giant Conversions and national brand California Closets will present how they worked with sales teams and web analytics to design a multi-step UX to lower abandonment, boost conversions, and increase revenues by over 150%.

Come see, and dissect, 10 successful social media conversion strategies including an iPhone App, a Podcast, video, and LinkedIn. Explore what made these campaigns winners, and learn innovative new tracking strategies for measuring social media conversions. After this session, you'll start thinking differently about how you define a conversion.

Much has been written, and taught, about writing great marketing copy. But this session will go beyond style, tone, and engagement. Conversion copy - words that persuade a person to take a desired action - is a unique combination of science and art that is critical at all stages of your campaign. Learn to write copy that gets past your readers' natural mental filters. Understand how your audience is researching your solution, and discover the key components that make up killer offers, headlines, subject lines and content. You'll leave this session with a proven formula for creating copy that converts that you can apply to all elements of your campaigns.

Want to drink from the Conversion Optimization fire-hose? Come see how leading advertisers are dramatically lifting leads, sales and revenue from their websites. Get the process behind the results, how they ran their tests and, most importantly, find out the "Why" behind the conversion rate lift. Whether you are in B2B, B2C, lead gen, e-commerce or affiliates, you will learn something that you can apply to your own optimization efforts immediately.

Today's internet marketing strategy should enhance and support your business' overall marketing objectives, including getting more leads and business from every website visitor. Creating compelling content that gets a visitor to act is critical to your online business. Leading businesses know that in addition to standard web pages describing their products and services, one of their best marketing tools is engaging content. Join Arnie as he presents nine powerful, low cost ideas any organization can you use to grow their business in six months or less. He'll discuss how to address pricing, compare your brand to the competition, use breaking news, create optimized videos and much more!.

In the United States, 7 in 10 babies born last year were BabyCenter babies. Come learn first-hand how this huge consumer brand has customized a strategy to leverage the increasing consumer adoption of smartphones. See what BabyCenter has discovered about the differences in mobile conversions, when an app might be better than a mobile site, and how to convert site visitors to registered users.

Search engine optimization has become more and more important as marketers try to increase relevant website traffic. In fact, many have sacrifed landing page best practices in the name of higher rankings. But a plan that blends the best of both SEO and conversion rate optimization can benefit not just your rankings but your CTR as well. Come see case studies that have shown how Title/Meta tag optimization can significantly improve CTR. Are search engines looking at CTR signals to determine longer term rankings? This question and more will be explored during this session that provides a practical strategy for optimizing both your landing pages and key on-page elements to improve organic rankings.

This is where it all comes together. Join Tim Ash as he moderates a an insightful panel discussion about the most critical conversion issues for 2012. This informal dialog will offer plenty of opportunity for audience participation. Have a burning question about testing, usability, targeting, forms, or anything else conversion-related? This is your chance to get answers to your biggest challenges from leaders in the field. You'll leave this session with solid, actionable advice about what you should be doing now, and in the near future, to make the biggest gains in your conversion rates.

Landing page optimization expert and SiteTuners.com CEO Tim Ash will help you to improve conversions by applying "The Matrix" methodology to your landing page or website. The Matrix is a framework for understanding your audience from a user-centered design perspective, and ensures that you will consistently get the more of right people through the right activities in the right order.