CXL LIVE 2019

7:00 pm

Pre-party at Parlor and Yard

Are you in town early? Come to our pre-party and meet fellow attendees before the main show begins! We’ve booked the whole bar just for CXL Live people.

Address: 601 W 6th St, Austin, TX 78701

We’re taking everyone to the event site by bus. Multiple departure times and locations – everyone will be emailed with the details + we’ll post the info in the event FB group.

9:00 am

Pre-conference workshop (optional): Using AI to drive revenue growth: From background to practical application

This workshop – lead by Guy Yalif from Intellimize – will teach you how to practically apply AI so that you can test more ideas, more quickly. You’ll learn the basics of different AI approaches, explore the data needed to make AI work well in CRO, and then run through practical exercises to help you get the most out of the different kinds of AI out there.

After this class you’ll be able to make more money from your conversion rate optimization efforts and spend less time doing so.

Topics include:
– What are the major types of AI and how do they relate to one another?
– What types of AI are best suited to solving different kinds of marketing problems?
– What data is needed to make AI work?
– How can I apply AI practically to test more ideas and deliver better results?
– How do I structure my optimization efforts to best utilize AI’s advantages today?

11:00 am

Registration open. Welcome coffee and tacos.

12:30 pm

OFFICIAL CONFERENCE KICK OFF

1:00 pm

Els Aerts – The Lost Art of Asking Questions.

World-class user research is the driver behind every successful optimization program. And when it comes to qualitative user research, that means getting up close and personal with your users. Talking to them. Asking them questions. The right timing, wording and tone of voice of your question can make all the difference. In this talk, Els helps you reconnect with this key element of qualitative research: the lost art of asking questions.

1:30 pm

Joanna Wiebe – Writing Mirrors: How to use the voice of the customer to write high-converting copy.

Your copy doesn’t sell a product – it creates a customer. Great idea, right? But how does that actually work in practice? In this talk, Joanna walks us step-by-step through how to turn VOC data from surveys, interviews and user tests into copy that your prospects will see themselves in.

2:00 pm

Carrie Bolton – Get real with your customers and your executives – how to really improve the customer experience

Join Carrie Bolton to hear how Vanguard is transforming itself to make investing easier and more successful for our customers. Hear true stories of how the Vanguard Client Experience team investigates areas of customer confusion and frustration and uses analytics, customer feedback and experimentation to convince the organization to change for the better.

2:30 pm

Break

3:00 pm

Judah Phillips – How I Learned to Stop Worrying about ML and Love the AI.

Let’s learn how to think like a data scientist and frame conversion data in a way that enables you – the business person – to train and build models use supervised machine learning. Some call this AI. In the CRO field where lots of the intelligence might be artificial, let’s learn new ways to take your optimization to the next level.

We will explore anonymized, real-world CRO use cases that benefit from supervised ML. We will avoid esoteric BS and heightened science-y diction few truly understand (but I will say “gradient boosting” and “deep learning” more than once). Instead we’ll concentrate on how to actually apply ML in business, the model classes that are important, and the model types that are useful specific to marketing optimization – in order to make more money as an entrepreneur or business leader and even impress your boss as a practitioner.

3:30 pm

Ton Wesseling – Validation in every organization.

If you want to go forward as a digital business you need to get things done. This is something we all optimized the last decades – more productivity per employee. The faster the better.

The big question nowadays is: are we getting the rights things done, are we adding value with the things we do? I’m not saying you should maximize Return on Investment on employees, on costs. I’m making a plea for steering on the needed ROI to maximize growth. Balancing quantity and quality – lowering risk by adding validation principles in such a way that growth is maximized.

Validation is a formula that works for every company – SMB and Enterprise, high numbers of online users and low numbers of online users. In this talk I’ll explain to you:

• Why validation is more important then CRO
• Why validation is more then embedding trustworthy experimentation
• The validation formula and how it should be used

And of course I’ll share what the key principles are to embed this way of working successfully in your company. This is a golden session for business owners and managers, product owners and managers and everyone working in conversion optimization, it will the change your perspective on CRO.

4:00 pm

Break

4:30 pm

Tammy Duggan-Herd – Pitfalls of the Unaware: How the Misapplication of Psychology is Damaging Your Conversion Rates.

Digital marketers, growth hackers, and conversion optimization experts have been increasingly applying psychological principles of persuasion to produce higher converting marketing campaigns, websites and apps. And there is no shortage of advice from these web psychology “experts” on how you too can apply psychology to mimic their results. There is just one problem. It’s not that simple.

These principles can work in the right context, but unaware practitioners (those without practical or scholarly experience) often don’t understand the conditions that influence the effectiveness of these principles, how different principles combine and how their misapplication can actually backfire, triggering the opposite behavior they intended. While impossible to remove every single potential backfire, in this session I will help you graduate from unaware to aware in order to mitigate your risks.

5:00 pm

Brian Cugelman – Consumer psychology, dopamine, and conversion design.

In this session, Dr. Cugelman will take you through a series of simple visual models, covering some of the key ways that dopamine shapes consumer’s emotions and behavior. After covering the core science, Dr. Cugelman will take you on a journey through the most common conversion design elements, and teach you how to approach them with neuroscience-inspired creative strategies.

By the end of this session, you will have a better understanding of dopamine-driven emotional design strategies, awareness of common psychological backfires, and be equipped to approach your next conversion design gig with a completely new perspective.

5:30 pm

Drinks and outdoor games

8:00 pm

Dinner and chill outside

Our famous outdoor dinner with live music, followed by drinks and games.

10:00 pm

Indoor party. DJ and dancing.

9:00 am

Breakfast

10:00 am

Lukas Vermeer – Democratizing online experiments at Booking.com.

At Booking.com we have been conducting evidenced based product development using online experiments for more than ten years. Our methods and infrastructure were designed from their inception to reflect Booking.com culture, that is, with democratization and decentralization of experimentation and decision making in mind.

In this talk, we explain how our approach has allowed such a large organization as Booking.com to truly and successfully democratize experimentation.

10:30 am

Ryan Thomas – Optimizing for Email Signups

Collecting emails usually involves trade-offs, but by combining research with tested tactics and patterns you can find the right balance to grow your email signup rates while improving the user experience. Ryan will take you through case studies of experiments that CXL has run, including the research that went into the tests and what we can learn from the results.

11:00 am

Break

11:30 am

Nina Bayatti – Was it really a winner? The down-funnel data you should be tracking.

What metrics are you tracking while testing — bounce rate, click-through rate, purchase conversions? In a recent test aimed to encourage ClassPass members to invite friends to join them at fitness classes, ClassPass tested incentivizing the invite-a-friend program. At a quick glance, the incentives appeared to work — share rate increased by 50% and trial acquisition CVR improved by 35%. But, the down-funnel data proved otherwise. In this session, learn which down-funnel data to consider to avoid cannibalizing potential growth.

12:00 pm

Eric Allen – Losing tests can be winners too. How to value and learn from a losing experiment.

Let’s face it, in experimentation there’s no such thing as batting 1.000. In fact, most experienced A/B testers know that a winning record is extremely hard to come by, especially as your program matures.

Some of these lessons can be expensive both monetarily and in opportunity cost. In this session we’ll explore some of the upsides of losing tests, including how to gain valuable insights from a loss and bring others around to the long-term benefits of losing.

12:30 pm

Lunch

1:30 pm

A choice of actitivies:
1) Go outside and enjoy life. Talk to people, play games.
2) How to upskill your team 3x faster: CXL Institute demo and Q&A session at the Post Oak room. Beer provided.
3) Lunch and learn session in the main room by Katie Hickey: What Should You Be Testing?

The ability to understand what your customers “know, want, and do” on your digital channels gives you the competitive edge to make educated changes to your conversion optimization strategy. When you start optimizing for your users’ needs, the value extends to end consumers.

– Learn how to leverage the right data for optimization success.
– Find out how to use different data sources to create tests that get actionable results
– Get the strategic 6-step framework for optimization that can easily be implemented
– Discover the role of user feedback in CRO

2:30 pm

Stefanie Lambert – Real Talk: Tough Lessons Learned When Building an Optimization Program

It’s no easy task to build, grow and improve an optimization program. Mistakes will be made but should not be feared. This session gets real about tough lessons learned and how these lessons build the know-how for creating successful optimization programs at any organization. Stefanie shares her experiences leading site optimization for brands such as Kohler, Express and Career Education Corporation.

3:00 pm

Lizzie Eardley – Chasing statistical ghosts in experimentation.

We all want to discover those successful changes that look as if they’ve had a significant positive impact on our metrics, but getting this wrong can lead you down an unprofitable path and end in wasted resources and effort. This talk will introduce some of the common pitfalls and mistakes optimizers make that can leave them thinking they’ve struck gold when really they are just chasing a ‘statistical ghost’ and pursuing an impact which does not exist.

3:30 pm

Emily Robinson – 6 Guidelines for A/B Testing.

Online experimentation is the gold standard for measuring the effectiveness of changes to a website. But while A/B Testing can appear simple, there are a number of issues that can complicate an analysis. We’ll cover 10 best practices that will help you avoid common pitfalls, whether your company is just getting started with testing or you’ve had a system established for years.

4:00 pm

Break

4:30 pm

Valerie Kroll – How to Present Test Results to Inspire Action.

As a CRO, you are certainly familiar with everything it takes to get a test out the door. From setting up your tools and tags, to gaining stakeholder buy-in, and most importantly, determining how to act on test outcomes, you expertly balance art and science to make sure your testing program is successful.

But how do you cram the life story of each test into a presentation to your product team—or even more challenging—to senior management? In this talk you’ll learn a different approach: the formula for tailoring a results-focused presentation to effectively communicate your message and inspire action from your audience.

We’ll discuss culture-shifting techniques to enable your organization to embrace calculated risk, realize the importance of hypothesis driven experimentation, and demonstrate how testing brings you closer to your users.

5:00 pm

André Morys – We’re All Gonna Die: Why “Optimization” Is The Acceleration Of Evolution

While most businesses envy the disruptive growth of Amazon or AirBnB, they can’t see the source of it. Having analyzed many fast-growing organizations, André has discovered an amazing principle behind their growth that most people overlook. He’ll deliver practical examples and an easy-to-follow framework for growth based on a principle that hasn’t changed in the last 20,000 years…

5:30 pm

Outdoor chill.

Networking and drinks while playing outdoor games.

8:00 pm

Dinner and Chill Outside

Our famous outdoor dinner with live music, followed by drinks and games.

10:00 pm

Indoor Party. DJ and dancing.

9:00 am

Breakfast

10:00 am

John Ekman – What is broken in digital transformation (and how to fix it)?

Organizations are talking about their exciting “digital transformation journeys.” But – beneath the surface, there’s a lot of frustration over missed goals and opportunities, money-eating initiatives and the feeling of not being able to break free from the past.

We will discuss the barriers to successful digital transformation and outline the four building blocks you need to put in place in order to transcend your digital growth boundaries.

10:30 am

Will Critchlow – What if your winning CRO tests are screwing up your search traffic? Or your SEO changes are wrecking your conversion rate?

While CRO A/B testing is well established, SEO A/B testing is fairly new. Over the last few years, the Distilled team has run hundreds of SEO split-test experiments across dozens of sites, and we have learned a lot. Often we have found CRO teams and SEO teams working independently to optimize different halves of the same funnel, which means missed opportunities.

We have recently started running ‘full funnel’ tests, that allow us to run a single test measuring impact on search traffic and conversion rate. In this session, you will learn about SEO A/B testing, discover some interesting results from those tests, and hear about some preliminary results from the new full funnel methodology.

11:00 am

Break

11:30 am

Brennan Dunn – How To Deliver Fully Personalized Experiences At Scale.

Who are your customers? What do they need from you? How can you give your visitors and customers a completely personalized experience? And what could this do for your conversions and sales?In this session, you’ll learn how to automatically segment your audience using on-site and channel behavior, email engagement, and by using progressive surveying. We’ll talk about how to link your website to your ESP/CRM, and pull & push segmentation data that you can use to modify your site’s content in real-time. I’ll dig into the data and show you what content you should be focused on personalizing, and showcasing A/B tested results from other companies who have seen massive growth by better understanding their audience and tailoring their entire on-site experience.

12:00 pm

Chad Sanderson – Aligning Experimentation Across Product Development and Marketing.

While A/B testing has traditionally been positioned as a marketing-first service, engineering, product, and data science teams have increasingly taken on a larger role in designing, delivering, and analyzing experiments.

Often times these teams can have different mindsets, different goals, and different internal cultures. This presentation will discuss the upsides and downsides to both styles of experimentation, as well as methods to unite any sized business behind a unified testing goal.

12:30 pm

Natasha Wahid – How to Get Your Entire Organization Psyched About Experimentation.

When you ask someone to get excited about “experimentation”, you are — in fact — asking them to get excited about being wrong.

Let that sit for a second. That’s a scary thing. 

Experimentation by nature disrupts; it challenges existing norms, workflows, and self-perceptions (aka “I know what I’m talking about”).

This session is for champions of experimentation who believe that it is the make-or-break strategy for growth, but are facing internal barriers to scaling experimentation. Who are looking for tools and strategies to get the rest of their organization excited about testing and learning.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• How to build and implement a strategic communications plan to gain visibility around your experimentation efforts
• How to empower your team and co-workers to participate in and celebrate your experimentation program
• How to ensure your Executive team is bought into experimentation, unlocking commitment, budget and resources

1:00 pm

Goodbye! Last lunch and chats with friends.

7:00 pm

After party in downtown Austin – rooftop at The Market. Drinks and fun with your new and old friends. 319 Colorado St, Austin, TX 78701

10:00 am

Kayaking on Austin town lake, followed by drinks!