独家优惠奖金 100% 高达 1 BTC + 180 免费旋转

Highlights from the conference formerly known as Conversion Hotel

What I learned about conversion rate optimization and business growth (bonus: further reading)

This year I had the honor to be one of 250 attendees at the sixth edition of the conference formerly known as Conversion Hotel. colloquially named Experimentation Island (it takes place on the dutch island Texel), this event brings attendees and speakers together to discuss conversion, data, A/B testing, and customer behavior. In 48 hours keynotes and unconference sessions are interspersed with late-night bar sessions and social talks for a deep dive into the world of conversion optimization.

TL;DR: The weekend was fun. I’ve learned a lot.

These are highlights from the keynotes and break-out sessions given at Conversion Hotel. These sessions provide a guideline for this document. While I intended to discuss just the keynotes, I ended up including many noteworthy sources, and even added a few of my thoughts too, which I hope you’ll find inspiring. I recommend not to read it in one sitting (unless you skip all the interesting references).

Enjoy and happy learning!

When you’re in the business of optimization and experimentation, you’ll likely make decisions regularly: Which tests to run, what to implement and how to cooperate effectively.

Fortunately, Stephen provides us with four strategies to make better decisions, run accurate experiments and build successful businesses:

Charlie Munger once said: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” This principle was derived from German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi.

“[Jacobi] knew that it is in the nature of things that many hard problems are best solved when they are addressed backward,” Munger counsels.

My strategy for triaging was simple. I separated decisions into four possibilities based on the type of decision I was making.

Do you want to make bold decisions? Make sure they are reversible, inconsequential or a combination of both.

You ran your test, waited six weeks for the outcome and now the results are finally in. You open the A/B tool and your test comes up negative. You ponder: “How could that be? The hypothesis stated it would be a winner?” But your case could still be a winner, so you find a different angle and now the test is successful. At least now all the hard work wasn’t for nothing. You go on and implement the successful test.

Why would you operate in such a way? Aren’t we rational professionals?

In experiments, it’s easy to think big. But a complete overhaul is seldom a good idea. This black and white, all-in thinking is a normal human tendency, but it leads nowhere. Often it’s much better to start small and scale. It’s okay to think big, as long as you start small.

Are you agitated by other’s failures? Do you feel threatened by other’s success? Regard each human as a teacher, his story as a lesson. It will make you a better person.

I thought it telling that the session “share your failures” had so few attendees. If you are an experimenter or run A/B tests regularly, you are familiar with failing.

M&M conferences involve the analysis of adverse outcomes in patient care, through peer review. The objectives of a well-run M&M conference are to identify adverse outcomes associated with medical error, to modify behavior and judgment based on previous experiences, and to prevent the repetition of errors leading to complications.

You can set-up an M&M meeting in your organization yourself (although you should probably change the name and topic). With a few simple guidelines, you can have successful failure meetings:

If this is a step too far, at least make sure you have a failure board (not digital) in a regularly visited place.

Friction is desirable and important because:

Friction is undesirable because:

Friction is everywhere. In nature but also online. Even the best-optimized check-out process has some form of friction.

Customers don’t like friction and will abandon the check-out process if it costs too much effort.

Ability
By removing friction, we essentially provide more ability. A thing becomes easier to do. This increases the odds of successful triggering.

In essence, the colors we use can produce a psychological feeling of friction. The red color of a back button is associated with unwanted behavior, adding perceived friction. A button with green color, on the other hand, has much lower perceived friction, pushing the customer forward in the check-out process.

Remember the desirable features of mechanical friction? Sometimes we want friction to steer a customer in the right direction. For instance, a difficult HTML form may lead to more phone calls with a better conversion rate.

Motivation
Some customers will accept more friction. The motivation to complete a task is higher even with limited ability. These customers are loyal to your business. Loyal customers are somewhat irrational. Their behavior to follow a path of resistance is unconscious and their willingness to buy is emotional. That’s not to say you shouldn’t work on removing friction.

Loyalty = emotional, unconscious, irrational
Think of it this way: motivation is based on an external locus of control (you have little influence over it) whereas ability is based on an internal locus of control (something which you have greater influence over). If you want long term success, provide an effortless customer journey.

Detecting friction can be done in a myriad of ways:

Are you smarter than Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos?

When it comes to friction, there’s no better example than joining a group of people talking. A closed circle of conversationalists is especially effortful to join. You need high motivation.

Most of the time, the group, has no desire to keep you from joining the conversation, so how could they provide a greater ability to join?

Sometimes you have to hit a threshold before you reach any utility. For instance, writing this post as a draft has no benefit. Even though it took me several days to write, it didn’t have any value until I hit the publish button. Aiming for perfection prevents you from reaching utility.

We live in a world with millions of data points. Everything online can be measured, but should you?

The Dutch have a saying: “Voor niets komt de zon op” which means the sun is the only thing [that rises] for free.

Time might be a reason not to retest, it’s also the best argument why you should retest. Seasonality could lead to subtle differences.

In his unconference session, Kevin Heiner talks about the top 3 most common blindspots in CRO programs, one of which is seasonality.

Seasonality is predictable, the influence on A/B test is not. On top of that, cyclical patterns are even more unpredictable modifiers.

Simply put, timing is everything. Revisiting your A/B tests may be worthwhile.

Even though this quote is wrongly attributed to Heisenberg, it is still too good to pass up on.

In statistical hypothesis testing, the p-value or probability value is the probability of obtaining test results at least as extreme as the results actually observed during the test.

How likely is it that what is measured in a small group also counts for the entire population? For A/B tests, to make an appropriate decision based on the data, you want both buckets to be the same size. If there are 500 people in group A, you want 500 people in group B.

And

Humans have exceptional qualities that are found nowhere else. From a philosophical standpoint, our ability to choose is rather unique.

Artificial intelligence is a hot topic. While AI has its uses in regression, classification, recommendation, image recognition, clustering, and anomaly detection, we shouldn’t be afraid they take over our jobs.

Machines are great for large data sets and personalization, they are generally better at classifying, recommending, clustering and recognizing. AI learns in one of three ways:

This technique can be used for image recognition, where each image is checked against a set of images wherein a pattern lies.

If robots’ strength is artificial intelligence, then human strength is authentic intelligence. We, humans, have four distinct characteristics which make us unique.

Who you are is 60% defined by nature and 40% by nurture. Warren Buffet, one of the greatest American investors call this the ovarian lottery:

What’s even better, 40% is nurture, so we can reprogramme ourselves. That’s why your mindset matters. Your brain is a muscle that, like any other muscle, requires training.

To reprogram, you need willpower. Unfortunately, we are ill-suited for this. There’s a chimpanzee in your brain that wants to procrastinate. Your monkey brain doesn’t want to work and increase performance, it wants you to eat, have sex and it’s very complaintive.

2. Kill the elephant
We are easily distracted. Many of us start each day by opening our inbox and engaging with whatever finds our attention. Because we follow up on our emails, there’s not enough time before lunch and in the afternoon we face a post-lunch dip. By then it’s too late to finish anything. We leave the elephant in the room and vow to hunt it down the next morning (or so we say).

Don’t start your day working on small tasks. Don’t open up your inbox and don’t get distracted. The morning is the best time to complete critical assignments.

If you want to read more about this, I wrote a post about morning rituals and how to make your mornings rock, not suck.

The third advantage we have over computers is our creative ability. Our imaginative ability has allowed us to construct civilizations, build skyscrapers and invent artificial intelligence. Our mind wanders between 30–50% of the time, making connections that no computer or animal ever could.

Furthermore, a tired brain is more creative but cognitively impaired. That’s why you should divide your workday into two parts.

We have a brilliant mind capable of abstract or concrete thinking. In social psychology, this is termed construal level theory. High-level construals are a way of thinking in a big-picture way or abstractly. At the low level, more emphasis is placed on how the situation is different from others.

The fourth advantage humans have over robots is the ability to form meaningful relations.

Relationships are the best medicine against social disorders. A machine left alone will never cry. Your phone doesn’t care if you touch it. But we do. That’s what makes us special.

As you have read above, the conference formerly known as Conversion Hotel was a great inspiration for me. If you got this far, congratulations! I hope you enjoyed every minute and learned a thing or two. If you’d like to further explore topics, sift through the reference list or read the recommended books listed below. If you have any questions or if you’d like to learn more about me, feel free to contact me.

If you want to dive deeper still and learn more about the topics discussed in this post, I recommend these books:

Authentic Intelligence

Friction

Psychology

Habits

Procrastination

Business

Add a comment

What is your view?

Send

Related posts:

Advent Avoidance

The darkness of my Advent is from my own eyes closed;. “Advent Avoidance” is published by Amie Tara Brodie.

NaNoWriMo is Over

November is over and that means that the mad dash to 50,000 words known as NaNoWriMo is over for another year. Writing is hard, so we need to celebrate every single achievement no matter how small…

4 Ways to Learn Skills Faster with Ultralearning

The concept of ultra learning is exactly what it sounds like. Acquiring new knowledge and skills within a short period of time. To get that promotion. To switch fields entirely. Or, as author Scott…