Why I’m Excited to Attend Opticon

If you’re focusing on getting more conversions from your existing traffic, then you need to attend Opticon.

Opticon is an upcoming conference put on by our friends at Optimizely from June 17th-18th in San Francisco. The overall focus of the conference is to bring together leaders and practitioners in the experience optimization and testing space to discuss the future of optimization and share actionable tactics for developing a mature, successful optimization program.

Also, Opticon is the perfect place for networking with the best of the best in the optimization industry which can lead to fruitful friendships, partnerships, and clients. In other words, you need to attend if you’re a conversion professional or you’re looking to hire one.

My Top 3 Most Anticipated Sessions for Opticon 2015

There’s going to be a lot going on at Opticon. Tons of speakers (check out the packed agenda), catching up with old friends, meeting new friends, and writing down the hundreds of experiment ideas discussed and presented at the conference.

With that being said, there’s only so much I’ll be able to do. I’m going to focus on these three talks (among 1 or 2 others) so I can spend the rest of my time interacting with the amazing folks attending.

1. Benchmark Your Optimization Program by Shana Rusonis, CMM at Optimizely: Shana Rusonis is the content marketing manager at Optimizely, and she’s a pro. Also, she gets to analyze the results of hundreds of conversion tests across numerous industries on a regular basis, which is why this topic on benchmarking optimization programs is a perfect fit.

While Shana is still finalizing the stats for her presentation, she said, “As we’ve looked to understand how teams conduct their optimization, build their teams, and measure success, we’ve discovered that teams who have invested in optimization are becoming very sophisticated; they’ve doubled down on the resources required to do optimization well – dedicated program managers, access to complementary tools, and internal understanding of process best practices. I’m looking forward to a discussion on the trends in our data and what that means for companies looking to make optimization a competitive advantage.”

Teams who have invested in optimization are becoming very sophisticated Share on X

As the analytics and conversion lead at McGaw.io, clients rightfully so want to know how to score certain conversion tests to deem if they’re successful or not. While I discuss statistical significance, the importance of continually testing and aiming for a lot of small wins, having hard data on each industry is something that interests me. This way I can show my clients a more in-depth report and how they stack up against their peers.

This will help me not only assess what “average” conversion test results looks like, but what amazing test results look like. That’s much more important to me and my clients as we’re always looking to create the best-in-class conversion tests.

2. Collaborating to Scale: How to Spread Optimization Across Your Org and Keep Things from Getting Messy by Katherine Shea, Product Manager, Rue La La and Cameron Deatsch, Head of Growth, Atlassian: One of the unique challenges in building CRO programs within organizations of all sizes is scaling and streamlining your efforts. Even with startups, having an employee, team or agency always running conversion tests across your website and app can be scary. Having the right collaboration strategy in place is key. The larger and more distributed the company becomes, this becomes even more necessary.

Katherine Shea, Product Manager at Rue La La and Cameron Deatsch, Head of Growth at Atlassian, knows this quite well. Seeing’s Katherine’s perspective from a large retail company and Cameron’s perspective from a large tech enterprise is something I’m particularly excited for. When multiple teams, vendors and web properties come together, maintaining a rigorous testing culture becomes incredibly difficult without the proper infrastructure.

Cameron Deatsch said, “As our business continues to grow, we constantly battle two opposing forces when it comes to running experiments. On one side, we have the desire to move fast, try new tactics and generally push the limits of our established systems and processes. On the other side, we have the need to inform various product, marketing and support teams, ensure quality controls and lastly make sure best practices are shared across the various teams running experiments. We are quickly finding that our organization, communications and processes around experimentation must evolve as quickly as the types of experiments we run.”

We have the need to inform various product, marketing and support teams, ensure quality controls and lastly make sure best practices are shared Share on X
We’ll certainly be using many of the techniques discussed during this Opticon presentation at McGaw.io to improve our client collaboration process. This will improve testing efficiency and scalability as our clients continue to grow. We’ve come across similar challenges as more teams, individuals and technologies come into play.

3. Moving the Needle in Your E-Commerce Funnel by Jesse Avshalomov, Director, Product and Growth, Teespring and Eddie Hartman, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer, LegalZoom: E-commerce companies have a unique challenge in which they need to produce a large volume of sales and increase their margins as much as possible which makes conversion optimization in ecomm companies necessary.

Since most of our clients are B2B SaaS companies with sales teams, we often see sales cycles of several months and nurturing those leads along the way is critical. When you’re dealing with e-commerce companies, however, you still have a funnel it’s just shorter and composed of different pieces.

Considering both Teespring and LegalZoom do a considerable amount of business through e-commerce, and they’re continuing to grow at incredible clips, their team has an enormous amount of experience and data around optimizing their e-commerce funnel. Their volume allows for small wins to equate to thousands or hundreds of thousand of dollars in additional revenue, which makes this presentation even more powerful.

Takeaway

Opticon is one of the few large-scale conferences around that brings together conversion optimization professionals from all over the world. It’s an unbelievable opportunity to learn a ton about how to be a smarter optimizer in a couple of days while meeting prospective clients, partners, employees, and friends.

I’ve found I find some of my best conversion test ideas from seeing what people in other verticals are doing, and then I apply that to my business and my clients’ businesses. There’s never a new idea, just new ways to tweak existing ideas to apply them to a particular scenario.

Will you be at Opticon? If so, drop a note below and let’s meet!