Preface

PAINFUL LESSONS LED TO THE CREATION OF THIS BOOK.

In late 2005, I (Khalid) had the opportunity to lead the design and implementation of one of the largest ecommerce websites in North America, with a huge budget: $15 million. My team of 20 senior ecommerce developers and I built a “feature-rich” website that integrated with several external systems in a miraculous three months. While I pushed my team to work harder and spend more nights at the office, the marketing team assembled first-year revenue projections: $500 million!

Excitement built as the go-live deadline was approaching. However, I still had concerns: will visitors come to the site? On the go-live day, I sat with the other two architects to monitor the server’s performance. I was wrong. The website received tens of thousands of visitors during the first hour. Everyone was ecstatic. Yes, visitors were coming.

As the hours passed, though, my earlier tension built up again. Despite the site receiving tens of thousands of visitors, customers placed fewer than 10 orders in those first critical hours. Ten orders was all we had to show our client for their $15 million investment. It was a disaster.

Why weren’t these visitors converting into customers? Looking back, the low number of orders wasn’t at all surprising.

We worked with an ad agency to create the design for the website. During the three months of implementation, we never discussed conversions, or even orders. In most cases, a few technical people, with little usability experience, decided how to design different pages, where to place elements, and how visitors would flow through the website. Both the technical and design companies promised the client a lot and delivered a great-looking website. It just did not convert.

That painful experience was not unusual. As more companies moved to the Web, most of them focused on driving visitors to their websites—the more eyeballs a website gets, the greater the chance that orders will be placed. However, the percentage of visitors placing orders was small compared to the total number of visitors. Marketers noticed this, and the practice of conversion optimization was born. While other areas of online marketing have developed tremendously in the past 15 years, conversion optimization is still in its infancy.

We started our practice in 2006 with a simple goal: create usable websites that visitors love, and generate more orders from these sites for clients. Consulting on conversion optimization projects suffers from the same problems as consulting in other fields. The quality of work a client receives is dependent on the skill set of the consultant working for them. Some clients we talked to felt that conversion optimization, while promising, involves random guessing and a lot of finger crossing. Since the early days of our company, we knew we had to establish a process and follow a methodology to generate consistent results for clients.

This book describes the Conversion Framework™, a process we developed in 2007 and have evolved since. The framework is built around eight principles: the first six principles cover how visitors interact with different websites and whether they are persuaded to stay or decide to leave. These principles are:

  • Understanding your website visitors through persona creation

  • Creating confidence and trust

  • Understanding the impact of the buying stages

  • Dealing with FUDs (fears, uncertainties, and doubts)

  • Using incentives

  • Engaging users

As you apply these principles to your website or campaign, you will begin to see what changes need to be made.

The seventh principle of the Conversion Framework asks you to test any change you make against your original design. By applying the science of online testing, you will measure the impact of any change you make on your bottom line. The eighth and final element of the Conversion Framework asks you to make a long-term commitment to conversion optimization—a willingness to iterate. Conversion optimization is not something you do only once. It is a long-term effort when done correctly. It should pay for itself for a very long time.

We have deployed this framework on hundreds of websites in different vertical markets to help increase conversion rates. The framework removes the guesswork from the conversion optimization process. It will provide anyone interested in optimization with a specific methodology to produce consistent results. The framework puts buyers at the heart of your optimization effort. It forces you to think of buyers’ needs, wants, motivations, and fears. By focusing on buyers, you will ultimately persuade more of them to become your customers. We continue to test the Conversion Framework and refine it every day.

How Should You Read This Book?

This book is divided into two sections. The first two chapters introduce online marketing concepts you’ll need to understand as you read the rest of the book. Chapter 1 covers some of the basic concepts in conversion optimization, and Chapter 2 explains some of the analytics concepts and mathematical formulas behind conversion optimization. These two chapters will provide you with enough information to understand the general concepts and numbers behind conversion optimization. A novice reader should start here.

If you are familiar with online marketing and have been doing it for a while, you can skip to the second section of the book, which starts with Chapter 3. This section is focused on the eight principles of the Conversion Framework.

Who Should Read This Book?

You may be a marketing and ecommerce professional who is interested in discovering new ways to maximize the ROI for the campaigns under your purview. You might be a sales professional looking for a way to optimize your sales funnels and increase output. You could be a web designer who is looking for ways to translate your beautiful designs into money for your clients. You may be a web developer or a software engineer creating great websites or ecommerce portals, but you have never focused on creating applications with revenues or users in mind—this is where one of the authors of this book started. Or you might be a small-business owner who is looking for quick tactics to implement on your website.

Who Should Not Read This Book?

We cast a wide net when we wrote this book, but there are a few people who might not enjoy it. Developers whose work stays far from the actual user of their application (i.e., developers of backend applications) aren’t likely to enjoy this book. Those who believe that conversion optimization is only about testing may not like our approach to optimization. Finally, those who are looking for pure tactics and are not concerned with the theory behind conversion optimization might find some of the chapters in the book boring.

About the Examples in This Book

Most of the examples in this book come from our practice and our clients. This is only natural since we are discussing a process and a methodology that was initially developed to serve our clients. In addition, most of the screen captures from analytics programs come from our own websites; for those that don’t, we made sure the websites and their data remained confidential.

If You Like (or Don’t Like) This Book

If you like—or don’t like—this book, by all means, please let people know. Amazon reviews are one popular way to share your happiness (or lack thereof). Or you can leave reviews on the book’s website:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9781449377564

The book’s website also provides a link to errata. Errata give readers a way to let us know about typos, errors, and other problems with the book. The errata will be visible on the page immediately, and we’ll confirm it after checking it out. O’Reilly can also fix errata in future printings of the book and on Safari, making for a better reader experience pretty quickly.

We hope to update this book’s content in future editions, including implementing readers’ suggestions and other input.

How to Contact Us

Conversion optimization continues to grow every day. As such, we continue to fine-tune some of the elements we’ve outlined in the book. Please let us know about any errors you find, as well as your suggestions for future editions, by writing to:

O’Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
800-998-9938 (in the U.S. or Canada)
707-829-0515 (international/local)
707-829-0104 (fax)

We have a web page for this book, where we list errata, examples, and any additional information. You can access this page at:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9781449377564

To comment or ask technical questions about this book, send email to:

For more information about our books, conferences, Resource Centers, and the O’Reilly Network, see our website at:

http://www.oreilly.com

Safari® Books Online

Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library that lets you easily search over 7,500 technology and creative reference books and videos to find the answers you need quickly.

With a subscription, you can read any page and watch any video from our library online. Read books on your cell phone and mobile devices. Access new titles before they are available for print, and get exclusive access to manuscripts in development and post feedback for the authors. Copy and paste code samples, organize your favorites, download chapters, bookmark key sections, create notes, print out pages, and benefit from tons of other time-saving features.

O’Reilly Media has uploaded this book to the Safari Books Online service. To have full digital access to this book and others on similar topics from O’Reilly and other publishers, sign up for free at http://my.safaribooksonline.com.

Acknowledgments

We have been blessed by God with wonderful opportunities like this book. We have also been blessed with a wonderful, supportive family throughout the writing process, and we wouldn’t have been able to complete this book without them. Special thanks go to Reem for being there whenever we called. Thanks also to Yaman Shukairy, Chris Goward, and Feras Alhlou for taking time from their busy schedules to review and provide insight on the book. We also want to thank John Hossack from VKI Studios and Trevor Claiborne from Google for allowing us to use the YouTube case study in the book. We are also thankful to Shereen Mir who was responsible for helping us secure the book deal. Special thanks to Simon St.Laurent for providing support and guidance on our first book!

Get Conversion Optimization now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.