Website Design, Search Engine Optimization

GaugeCon started on Thursday March 8, 2012. This is their second conference held in San Francisco, CA. They always time it after the eMetrics Conference, which I understand is fabulous. The event kicked off  with a fabulous keynote speaker, Dan Siroker the founder of Optimizely which I will get into later. What is most impressive is his past experience as a product manager at Google, then leaving Google to be the Director of Analytics for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.

His keynote speech was Beat the Back Button: How to Optimize for Engagement

The focus was on testing different landing pages he went through a few examples and shared lessons he has learned;

• Lesson #1 Define quantifiable success metrics
  One place to start – visitors flow identify the bottle necks in your funnels online
• Lesson #2 Less is more reduce choices you offer online
  Less boxes more people will sign up, example as simple as to  removed  the confirm email box
• Lesson #3 Words Matter – Focus on your call to action
  Donate button experiment
  Know what your viewers are looking for and use those words as your call to action
  Changing  “submit” wording to what they are actually doing can make a big difference in engagement
• Lesson #4 – Fail Fast, meaning if you are failing do it quickly make changes and move on
• Lesson #5 Start today – He discussed the following products to help with this processry these products
• Website Optimizer
• Ominture Test and Target
• Optimizely.com can change the website for testing different versions
  Needless to say I was wowed by Optimizely and it takes a lot to wow me. But the drag and drop features and the perceived simplicity of making changes was impressive. I would definitely take a good look at his product.

Slides located at: bit.ly/optimizelybestpractices