It’s been a hectic couple of days here in San Jose. The inaugural
Conversion Conference, set up by Tim Ash from SiteTuners,
is generally agreed by both attendees and presenters to have been an
unqualified success.
From my perspective it was gratifying to spend time with so
many conversion professionals. Everywhere I went people were talking about
testing methodologies and the comparative advantages of A/B and multivariate
testing. It was conversion geek heaven.
The speaking tracks were broken up into four groups:
Persuasion, Best Practices, Hands On and Testing. Having sampled at least
one presentation of each group I found them to be relevant and useful.
The conference kicked off Tuesday morning with a keynote
address from Tim Ash himself. Tim is one of the pioneers of Landing
Page Optimization and he delivered an entertaining introduction breaking
down the basics into easily digestible and practicable suggestions.
Straight after Tim, two presenters tag-teamed a session
called The Power of Split Testing. Both Brooks
Bell and Lance Loveday delivered
valuable insights into the basis of this vital art. Brooks, in particular
suggested the 5 Ts that must be considered when it comes to A/B testing:
- Traffic
- Technology
- Time
- Trust
- Team
Throughout this and every other session I was in, people
were tweeting furiously to get the word out to their networks. By tuning in to
the conference hashcode, #ConvCon, I was able to get real-time updates from the
parallel track. It was a sign of the conference’s quality that there was always
something interesting going in each of the two meeting rooms and seating space
was almost always at a premium with listeners sometimes spilling out into the corridor.
Day two started in fine fashion with a presentation from
Bryan Eisenberg delivered at breakneck speed. Bryan’s energy, undiminished by
his impressive weight loss, woke everyone up and led into another day of
fascinating sessions.
All in all, I feel that the conference more than justified
its exis
tence. There was a clear need for a dedicated conversion conference and
I’m thrilled to note that the next
one is already scheduled for October. I have the feeling that most of this
week’s attendees will come back and that, once word gets out, there will be
more people lining up to visit the show.
For now we will have to rely on the presentations from this
show which Tim Ash has promised to make available to everyone who attended. In
addition, all the sessions were filmed. I’m not sure what Tim intends to do
with all this footage, but, if you want to see it, you had better contact him
yourself and request it.
