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So today's OMReport is with Tim Ash. Tim, please introduce yourself.
Well I'm Tim Ash, the CEO of SiteTuners, it's an agency
based in San Diego, California. We specialise in conversion
rate optimisation and I also run the Conversion Conference
Events Series and I've written a couple of books on
landing page optimisation.
Right, so you're kind of educating the whole world about
conversion optimisation since very, very early on. Do you
feel it was undervalued for quite a long time, and it's
just starting to get the position in the marketing that it
should have?
Well I think the awareness of it has certainly grown,
in fact this year content marketing as well as conversion
optimisation were ranked by eMarketer as the number one
initiatives that online marketers are working on. But I
think it's still undervalued because we focus on traffic
acquisition because that's where the money is spent but we
don't realise that the best way to make it profitable is
actually to do conversion rate optimisation.
So what do you think, will there be... I mean, how much can
it grow? Can it be like tenfold as much conversion optimisation that we have to do?
Well certainly there's a need for it, as I like to say
there's a lot of ugly babies out there: websites and
landing pages that are very awful, and if you think about
the money there's one dollar being spent on conversion rate
optimisation for every 82 dollars spent on driving traffic,
so you tell me if that's imbalanced.
Yeah that's definitely imbalanced! I wonder if you have
like a guts feeling where it's gonna land? Is it gonna be
1:10 or is it gonna be 1:1 or 1:40...
I think it'll never be 1:1 because you do need to spend the
media and the dollars to drive the traffic...
So what's the target where you're developing the market to?
Because you're a major driver of the whole development,
right?
I see it growing by an order of magnitude eventually the
companies that are very successful with it will put in kind
of a lot of tools that will make it more effective but they
won't necessarily fall under a conversion rate optimisation
budget so things like marketing automation or third party
data and, or being able to have behavioural targeting on
your website. Those aren't technically conversion things...
So they'll be in the marketing spend but they'll also help
the conversion optimisation.
Absolutely. The goal of them will be to improve conversions.
Right. So I have the... because I'm a more SEO-focused
person, I guess since last year since Penguin and Panda
came out and especially Panda that targeted, like, good
websites that are good for the user, I think at least since
then, you know, conversion optimisation and how users
behave when they come to the website is kind of on top of
every SEO's mind. Do you also feel that kind of growing
need for your books, for your services and so on?
Yeah absolutely, in fact I spoke many years ago at SEOMoz
at their annual conference and I told 600 SEOs in the room
that what they did didn't matter, cos the way they were
getting traffic there was completely counterproductive to the user's experience.
How was the reaction? Did they throw anything?
Well, I haven't been back since, but...
Maybe this year, maybe this year!
I think that you're right that more SEOs, more PPC
managers, more affiliate managers are becoming aware that
conversion is central to the way they make money.
Yeah, from the PPC angle I always see things becoming more
and more and more expensive so they just see they can't
spend more, so they wonder if it can become efficient. It's
kinda the angle I always hear from my friends who are more
in the PPC business why they care more about conversion
optimisation...
Yeah, and then I would say also that even the part that
you do see on the website or the landing page is not
enough. If you are lucky enough to get someone's email
address, the importance of back-end systems, email marketing, marketing automation, lead
scoring, data pans, some of those other things that
we're mentioning are secret weapons behind the scenes. If you're
not using those, you're never going to be able to match
someone who is.
So actually if you wanna do it the whole way through it
has to, you know... You're not acquiring customers then
doing conversion rate optimisation but instead you're kind
of putting the conversion rate optimisation in the online
marketing strategy when you're planning it to be able to
get all the data that you later wanna use.
Absolutely right, so if it's a long sale cycle or something
with an expensive ticket item you need to think about a
content marketing strategy to support every part of the
sale cycle and it might start with a download in exchange
for an email and that gives you the right to have an
ongoing conversation with them.
Right. But what are some things you could share because
you have the conference that you do worldwide, it's in
Berlin, it's in London, it's in the States in
several cities...
Paris... The US schedule is San Francisco in the spring,
Chicago in the summer and then Boston in the fall.
Right, so it's like six times a year. What are... Do you
see some differences when you come to Europe? Are there
like some special tics of certain nations that you can
share? I mean I always remember that French people love to
fill out stuff for newsletters and love getting newsletters. There's probably more stuff you
could share...
And they also love to eat a lot of butter and stuff.
That's true. No, but do you have like any national tics
that you can always remember, or...
Well I would say that, you know, Americans are very
aggressive about data collection. We have no illusions
unlike you Germans that there's any online privacy at all.
Haha haha haha!
So we've just given up on that idea. So it's OK to use
tactics that are a little more in-your-face and collect
information. I think in countries like the UK and Germany
especially it's harder to get information out of people so
you kind of need to give them more content upfront and
establish trust that way before you ask for anything
in return.
Right, so who are mostly your customers, are they mostly
people that have like a certain service online... like one,
you know, big huge page selling service, like a dating
website or is it mostly ecommerce websites, or travel
websites... what are, you know, what are your... do you
have a focus area? Or like really broadly...
The answer is all of the above. We're horizontal specialists, we focus on conversion but we
have a significant practice in ecommerce, another
one in business-to-business lead gen, and the rest
is business-to-consumer lead gen so we worked
in all those industries... in travel, lots in ecommerce,
lead gen for financial services, consumer products... you
name it. Nestle, Intuit, Google, Facebook are all our
clients. We also have a small business division so
we do help small businesses...
So how big is SiteTuners, if I may ask?
Well we're pretty large and growing. We're no Google, but...
OK. Isn't it hard to... because... at least in Germany,
because I don't know how the... what the market HR-wise
look elsewhere, but... In Germany it's really hard to get
people who have, you know, experience and skills in that
area. How do you educate your people?
Well I think it's a deeper market in the US, and we have a
core, we're based out of San Diego, and we have a core of
senior consultants and grown-ups that are responsible for
themselves that we work with nationally, so we're drawing
from that national pool, and because of our thought
leadership and stature in the industry we can attract the
best people. We also have to train quite a few, so we found
that backgrounds in writing, in psychology, in usability
are all a good starting point and then you have to
cross-train them in all of those other areas as well.
Wow! Do you also sometimes help clients educate the people
who work with you? On the client's side?
Yeah it's interesting you ask that, we actually have three
main practice areas. The first are best practices, redesigns or cleaning up websites, so kind
of a blueprint for a high-converting web experience. The
second is of course testing and test strategy development,
and the third is knowledge transfer, so mostly with our
enterprise clients we do a 360 degree company assessment
and then teach them to fish, if you will, by getting
the right organisational structure, the right skill
set on their team, the right accountabilities and support
of upper management, so it's really kind of being a
change agent inside of their company.
Wow! That's quite deep, but do you also like, when you're
going to a company and try to kind of educate, do you try
to tell different stories to different, let's say, target
groups, like the tech guys you would tell something else
than the upper management? How does that differ, you know,
or how many different kind of target groups that you have
to talk to in their individual language, do you, you know,
do you have in your mind when you think of, you know,
bringing it into an organisation?
Well in my book 'Landing Page Optimization' I have a whole
chapter devoted...
Can you show it please?
Well absolutely, I'd be glad to...
It's right there, it's like the classic, you have to have
this book!
Well thank you, that's very kind of you! In the book I
have a whole chapter devoted to kind of the politics of
organisational side of pulling this off inside of your own
company and definitely the mind-set of IT people versus
agency and branding people is radically different and of
course there are other stakeholders as well. You do have
to speak to them in their own language, but I have some
strategies in the book for kind of how to co-opt them in
to get them to see the benefit of what you're doing
for them.
How did you become what you are? What have you done before?
Haha haha!
No I mean it's... Is it a fair question to ask?
It is a fair question.
Because it is quite a unique position you're in, I think,
because you're one of the thought leaders on this topic so
I was wondering, like, how did you get there?
Well in retrospect it seems like it was a pre-direct line
because as an undergraduate I attended University of
California, San Diego, had a dual major in computer
engineering and cognitive science which is in the
psychology department, so hardware and wetware, if you will, or software and wetware! It combined
them both. Internet marketing is this interesting mix
of being very accountable, granular and measurable, and
at the same time needing that art of the psychology, the neuro-marketing,
the direct response copywriting that takes the other side
of the brain, so I like to think I'm using both sides.
Right. So, you mentioned the other department is the one
where you redesign websites?
Yes.
So do you, like, try to make a blueprint without even
looking at what the customer's actually doing? Kind of
trying to, you know, without the, let's say, probably
narrow view of the customer, how they think of their
website and their product, do you try to, you know, do it
on a really white paper and then see how your crazy, maybe,
weird new ideas come together with the thoughts of the
customer and then find something that's in between or how
does it usually work out?
Well we have two main flavours of redesigns: what we call
the strategic jump start and the tactical jumpstart. A lot
of companies come to us and say 'We want higher conversion
but we're not gonna switch content management systems,
we're not gonna change... programme anything new, we don't
wanna change our information architecture. Can you help us?' That's a tactical jumpstart.
We can still move the needle, but not as much. It's a...
basically, what can you do from a visual and usability standpoint
on key pages on our site and to clean up the user
experience. The strategic jumpstart is much more rigorous.
It's basically when it's time to blow it up and bring in
the bulldozer and start over. And the key there is really there's
a very deep step of understanding your customers. We come
up with use cases or user scenarios.
Like personas or groups of customers?
No, personas I think are actually not that useful. They're,
you know... 'Mary is a cosmopolitan Manhattanite that likes
to go to bars on Saturdays.' That doesn't tell me how she
would buy shoes.
Right.
You see what I mean?
That's an interesting topic and we have a client in that
area. No worries.
OK, well I'll be glad to chat about it. But what we found
is that you create personas based on our matrix... architecture... basically getting the right
people through the right tasks in the right order, so we
identify roles of people showing up at the site, what specific
tasks they're trying to accomplish or what their intention
is on that visit, and then we grade the site experience
against that, so you get a kind of narrated walkthrough
of your site experience so we assign a letter grade to
that, or a number grade I guess in Germany. We fail a lot of
our clients, but it gives us the insight by kind of walking
a mile - or kilometre - in our visitors' shoes.
Don't worry, we'll get the mile.
...that we find out exactly what's wrong with the site and
that's a... we don't jump just at information architecture
or wire-framing right away, you have to understand what's
broken before you try to fix it.
And you do that for all the potential customer groups and
their tasks that they want to accomplish? For each of them
you do a walkthrough, grade it...
Exactly. And that's a disciplined way to make sure there
aren't any holes in your web experience. And then we'll
take that through to information architecture, wire-framing
and then visual mock-ups. We found that if you just hand
off wire-frames to designers they're gonna decorate the
pages and destroy their focus and their intent in what the
business purpose is. So we give guidelines and take it as
far as kind of the layered photoshop stage of rough visual
designs.
Wow. That's quite a bit. That's quite operative, one could
even say.
Yeah no, you could, if you wanna make it a little more
on-brand or polished that's fine, but you can't change the
visual focus on the page and you can't distract from the
business purpose of it.
You also said you clean up the pages: it sounds like you
take away a lot, or is that just a misrepresentation of
mine?
No, no, when you're talking about the tactical jumpstart
and as far as the user experience goes, yeah from an SEO
perspective we might say 'Get that text of the
top of the page...'
Noooo!
Just the top of the page! It can still be on the page,
but you have to remember why it's there. It's really not
for Google's algorithm...
I know the discussion, yeah.
It's there for your visitors.
That's true.
And more and more Google cares about the visitor experience.
Definitely, that's why I'm saying, you know, more and more
SEOs care about conversion rate optimisation: are people
staying on my page or are they bouncing away and
pogo-sticking or are they really, you know, enjoying what
they're catered to? All right then thanks so much for your
time, Tim. It was great meeting you!