While mediocre people are dime a dozen, good people are always in demand. But good optimizers are in very high demand, everyone and their mother is trying to hire one. Alas they can be hard to find. If you’re looking to hire one, what should you look for? What makes an optimizer a great optimizer?
In many ways conversion rate optimization is really decision optimization. If you are doing it right, you will constantly discover that what you thought mattered – actually doesn’t.
You should split test the headline first! Bollocks. The images! What a load of crap.
That’s the kind of advice most articles out there would give you. The truth is that answering “what to test first” is like answering “how much does a car cost?” – it depends.
AB testing is supposed to be straightforward and extremely transparent. It should be so easy to see the ROI – especially when compared to opaque stuff like SEO. But is it really so transparent as we’d like to think?
One of the great truths that people ignore when it comes to optimization is that you can fail with any tool. It’s only when you are trying to succeed that differences in tools really matter.
If you’ve looked at enough SaaS websites, you’ve probably noticed a bit of a theme: home pages designed to act as landing pages.
There are many, many, many lists of conversion optimization best practices. Some are sacrosanct:
These practices often come from broad trends observed over many experiments and they highlight what usually and typically works. Often, they’re tapping into a kernel of persuasion wisdom.
All testing programs, no matter how great or awful, think they are doing pretty good and can get better.
Another one bites the dust. Here are our most read articles for 2014. Make sure you didn’t miss any.
As more and more people start to look to testing and conversion optimization as a consistent and meaningful tool for their marketing and other initiatives it is important that people start to realize that optimization as a discipline is not just a false add-on to existing work. Testing when done correctly can and should be by far the number one driver of revenue for your entire site and organization, and yet according to 3 of the major tools on the market the average testing program only sees 14% of their tests succeed.