It's a Golden Age! Interview With Brian Massey [Conversion Sciences]

Brian appears in his trademark lab coat when speaking to corporations, universities, and conference attendees around the world.He authors The Conversion Scientist blog, and has written for ClickZ.com, Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and the Content Marketing Institute. He lives and works in Austin, Texas where life and the Internet are hopelessly entwined.

Today Brian is our guest at CallPage interview series!

Magda: In your latest post on „Marketing Land” you write that you were not going to declare 2016 the year of conversion optimization, but „something’s definitely going on”. How do you see the development of optimization in 2017?

Brian Massey: I think we are still in a growth phase. It’s another year of conversion optimization entering the vocabularies of business owners and directors of marketing. There are some interesting changes, however.

•  Machine learning has been implemented in an accessible way thanks to tools like Sentient Ascend.
• The availability of training from companies like Conversion XL
• The rise of the Data Scientist as a career path in digital marketing

Magda: Can you name three things that every marketer needs to know about conversion?

Brian:
1) You are already focused on conversion. You just need to start adding data.

2) If you aren’t comfortable with collecting data and doing statistical analysis, your time as a marketer is limited.

3) Data makes it easier to be creative. Dive in!

Magda: How did the CRO landscape changed since you first got involved?

Brian: Mostly, the tools have shaped our agency more than anything. The availability of low-cost AB testing tools has put testing into the hands of every business. You can do focus groups online with services like UserTesting.com and UsabilityHub.com. Click tracking tools such as HotJar, CrazyEgg and Inspectlet let you watch visitors use your site. Now we’re getting machine learning tools as well.
It’s a golden age.

Magda: What is your takeaway tip for better conversion?

Brian: Landing Pages are the most powerful tool. When you know something about the traffic that is coming – the ad that brought them, the link, the site, the email – designing a page for them will give you the best possible conversion rates. See our Landing Page Webinar.

Magda: Can you share your biggest customer success story?

Brian: One of our clients was severely impacted by the Google algorithm updates on Google in 2012. They lost half of their organic traffic overnight. Fortunately, we had been optimizing for them and had roughly doubled their conversion rates. It could have been a disaster, but they had separated their revenue from the traffic curve.

Magda: Thank you for the interview, Brian!