This talk is about understanding your customers better, and providing them with a better experience, helping them complete their tasks faster, simplifying everything. This isn't a talk about SEO, PPC and the like. This is a talk about making sure your Drupal site is ready for the traffic that these digital marketing activities generate. It's also about optimizing your site so that the traffic generated by (and money invested in) digital marketing is not wasted.
There is an old adage that says, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half” – well, it’s the same in our industry and the best practices we employ. Any given best practice works for half the websites we create – the problem is we don’t know which half any given website belongs to. Blindly copying and implementing “best practices” leads to results that are far from optimal, and in the age of abundant data, it's highly unscientific. We can only *know* through data.
This talk covers principles of conversion rate optimization, i.e. tracking and optimizing the rate at which your Drupal site visitors perform valuable activities such as filling out a contact form, buying a product, enrolling as a student, or donating.
The goal of the talk is to provide a high-level overview of the following relevant subject areas in order to guide participants' further research and discovery:
* Analytics fundamentals, goal tracking, and how to mine for conversion opportunities.
* Best practices in web forms, eCommerce, buttons and calls to action, fold and page length, home pages, visual hierarchy, persuasive design, typography and content.
* Persuasive copywriting, emotional content strategy and microcopy.
* Conveying value propositions and prompting conversion through layout, design and copy.
* Testing strategies and tools for optimization through A/B, multivariate, user and session-based testing. Common mistakes and best practices.
