Another great event came to Brighton on the 17th of March ? Brighton CRO brought about plenty of information on the latest tools coming from Google, techniques in ideation and industry talks from Fresh Egg. All made that little bit sweeter with plenty of pizza & beer.
Below we have cut down the event into a few key points, however we would first like to send best wishes to Craig Sullivan who unfortunately could not make his talk due to an unforeseen emergency. We look forward to seeing him at his next event!
Our Creative Blend top takeaways from Brighton CRO:
1) Google 360 suite is coming? Be prepared because things are about to change.
Very little is known about the 360 suite coming from Google however one thing is clear, the new product range will supply more intuitive features for conversion rate optimisation; more testing, personalisation and better data analysis.
The pricing structure and segmentation of each of the products within the 360 suite was discussed at length, with the hope of a ?light? or ?basic? version being offered. However it was also theorised that with the arrival of the latest packages the gap between the free version of analytics & the premium (360 suite) is only going to grow ? so with a purchase of a ?light? version this could potentially be a halfway house for your clients. More can be found on the suite and its breakdown here – https://www.google.com/analytics/360-suite/
2) Ideation and how to spot your next big idea.
The talk started with a run down of the usual suspects of analysis & data collection ? beginning with focus groups & qualitative data, through to website analysis combing over each statistic to paint a picture of your user experience.
However whilst discussing each of these methods, a single pertinent question was asked ?What are the business goals for your clients/business? ? this is of course one of the driving factors for any new test, especially when key stakeholders are involved in the sign off process. In order to understand this a discussion must take place at the highest level of the board or team to drill down to ?what do we actually want? ? this will bring about a need for a well run workshop and feedback sessions.
Of course ideation can come from anywhere but we would always recommend looking to your data before taking on any new build, test, update or tweak to your website. Without this you really are guessing at what your user needs.
3) Personalisation and how to use it effectively
Hans Hoogenboom who is a Conversion Strategist at Fresh Egg gave this talk. Hans started his talk with the acceptance that we (as a web community) are already personalising our user experiences with the introduction of responsive design, geo-location based searches & language translation on websites. So personalisation isn?t new to us an online community. This was a key point to Hans? talk, we have always worked with personalisation however we haven?t always used it to it?s most effective.
Hans then went onto discuss how personalisation can be used to bring together a very effective personal experience for your customers. One such example of this was taken from Optimizely, where they had launched a new PPC campaign with 3 individual adverts, each describing 3 different ways to talk about their products such as; ?The best MV testing?, The best A/B testing? & ?The best CRO tool? (this isn?t the real advert copy) as a user clicks on one of the PPC ads they land on the site with the correct corresponding headline. The hypothesis behind this test is that if the user is interested in MV testing and clicks on this advert Optimizely should then provide a consistent journey through to booking, with a positive focus towards MV testing ? unfortunately Hans didn?t have the results but an interesting example none the less.
Personalisation is certainly an interesting field of study and we believe there is much more you can do to tailor a users visit to your website. Showing a real understanding of their needs, previous selections, desires and tailoring your approach to suit them – this will be the subject of our next blog post in April.
In closing Brighton CRO was a great event with a lot of like-minded individuals coming from many different industries & backgrounds. It is well worth a visit to meet some great people and enjoy a beer & a slice.
