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Trends in Technical Optimization WILL CRITCHLOW
Trends in Technical Optimization
WILL CRITCHLOW
This is going to be a weird technical presentation
Your job is not answering “which of A or B is better for Google”?
The future of technical recommendations is
business cases
Win hearts as well as minds
#1 it could be
amazing
Medium is exceptionally fast
Image/Graph etc.
#2 we’re behind
#3 customers care
We had a client whose cart showed EUR to US customers
We couldn’t even persuade them to test
matching the currency to the visitor
Until we tried Qualaroo
confusing for it to show as USD when prior to
checking out then only showing EUR
Quote price in U.S. $
Country selected was USA price should be in
US dollars not EUR
If it was possible to see the price in USD, it was not obvious how to do
this
The first page showed my purchase in
American Dollars, but checkout was in Euros
Win minds as well as hearts
Do your recommendations pass the Bezos Test?
Great forecasts are stories, not numbers
Put all the Excel in the appendix.
No-one will read it. Sorry.
ASSUMPTIONS beat ANSWERS
Decisions should bedata AWARE
not data DRIVEN
How to forecastExamples are for illustration only
#1 bottom up
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
#2 top down
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
#3 based on tests
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
#4 case studies
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
As you start forecasting more, you’ll find you need to work on
bigger ideas that are more likely to move the needle
Then you could easily do some dumb things
“You can’t possibly succeed without
graceful degradation”
Err.
“You can’t possibly succeed without graceful degradation”
“You can’t possibly succeed without graceful degradation”
“You can’t possibly succeed without graceful degradation”
Does nothing
“You can’t possibly succeed without graceful degradation”
Goes to a
blank page
I want to talk about some great sites
Imagine you’re pitching this guy
Don’t be responsible for stopping this guy building great stuff
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
Image creditshttp://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/
