SEARCHLOVE DAN DIEGO 2013-Will Critchlow

Trends in Technical Optimization

Transcript

1. Trends in Technical Optimization WILL CRITCHLOW
2. This is going to be a weird technical presentation
3. Your job is not answering “which of A or B is better for Google”?
4. The future of technical recommendations is business cases
5. Win hearts as well as minds
6. #1 it could be amazing
7. Medium is exceptionally fast
8. #2 we’re behind
10. #3 customers care
11. We had a client whose cart showed EUR to US customers
12. We couldn’t even persuade them to test matching the currency to the visitor Until we tried Qualaroo
13. confusing for it to show as USD when prior to checking out then only showing EUR
14. Quote price in U.S. $
15. Country selected was USA price should be in US dollars not EUR
16. If it was possible to see the price in USD, it was not obvious how to do this
17. The first page showed my purchase in American Dollars, but checkout was in Euros
18. Win minds as well as hearts
19. Do your recommendations pass the Bezos Test?
20. Great forecasts are stories, not numbers
21. Put all the Excel in the appendix. No-one will read it. Sorry.
22. ASSUMPTIONS beat ANSWERS
23. Decisions should be data AWARE not data DRIVEN
24. How to forecast Examples are for illustration only
25. #1 bottom up
26. We have 10,000 location pages that aren’t indexed. This change should get 80% of them indexed. Each should get a minimum of N visits / month from search. That results in $M
27. #2 top down
28. The total search volume for nail salons in our target cities is X, by building this new section of our site, we can capture y% of that, resulting in $Z incremental revenue
29. #3 based on tests
30. When we made this controversial change on a small section, it resulted in an uplift of x%. If we get 80% of that uplift across the whole site, we’ll get an incremental $Y
31. #4 case studies
32. We are planning a domain migration. Other people’s experience (moz 1, moz 2) indicates a drop in the a%- b% range for somewhere in the C weeks to D weeks range
33. As you start forecasting more, you’ll find you need to work on bigger ideas that are more likely to move the needle
34. Then you could easily do some dumb things
35. “You can’t possibly succeed without graceful degradation”
36. Err.
37. “You can’t possibly succeed without graceful degradation”
38. “You can’t possibly succeed without graceful degradation”
39. “You can’t possibly succeed without graceful degradation” Does   nothing  
40. “You can’t possibly succeed without graceful degradation” Goes   to  a   blank   page  
41. I want to talk about some great sites
42. Imagine you’re pitching this guy
43. Don’t be responsible for stopping this guy building great stuff
44. Thanks. Any questions? WILL CRITCHLOW will.critchlow@distilled.net @willcritchlow
45. What were all those sites in the screencast? http://www.teehanlax.com/story/social-portrait/ http://www.teehanlax.com/story/shipwire/ [http://www.shipwire.com/] http://www.teehanlax.com/story/readability/ http://www.teehanlax.com/story/teehan-lax/ http://www.cabletv.com/the-walking-dead http://erfgenaam.submarinechannel.com/en/ http://www.photo-mark.com/funhouse/chess/ http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/the-jockey/ http://hypervenom.nike.com/gb/en_gb http://moto.oakley.com/ http://www.officeline.se/kampanj/ http://www.dodge.com/en/2014/durango/ https://squareup.com/careers/creative
46. Image credits http://www.flickr.com/photos/18548283@N00/2218655624/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeleary83/2222244131/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/8137913805/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/zachheller/5116640316/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/michpics17/6838794315/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephangeyer/3229631450/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/grandmaitre/5846058698/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mgarbowski/5516177047/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/steffireichert/9174005276/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/doug88888/4616496228/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/8163552292/