I have been privileged to be on the advisory board for the conference as well as presenting at 2 of the sessions, on e-commerce best practice and rapid fire live page critiques.

Read on to find out more about this 2 day conversion conference.

1) Confessions of a Conversion Rate Optimiser – Bryan Eisenberg (Conversion Guru!)

With three best-selling books and more than 15 years of conversion optimisation experience under his belt, Bryan Eisenberg is legendary for his work is persuasion architecture, persona development and conversion rate optimisation. In this tell-all keynote, he reveals the intimate secrets that few insiders ever get to hear.

Glimpse into the history of CRO and understand what will happen to this discipline in the future. Learn from almost two decades of successes and failures — why Bryan thinks most marketers are still in the dark ages in terms of conversion and testing, and how his simple three-step formula has streamlined the testing process for some of the most successful companies on the web.

If time permits, we put Bryan in the hotseat when he opens up the session for a no-holds-barred question and answer period that could transform the way you think about online marketing.

2) Mobile & Realtime Optimisation – Amy Africa (Eight by Eight)

Why is your established online strategy not transferring well to mobile? What are the important factors (and what aren’t) in determining how to increase your mobile conversions? What delivers results, how do you deal with “abandons” and save up to 60% of them? What should you be tracking? For anyone currently active in mobile, or planning to be, this is a keynote session you really cannot afford to miss. You’ll hear why your mobile conversion strategy has to be different and pick up the tips and tricks you need to put it in place.

3) Praxeology – Lessons from a lost science – Rory Sutherland (Ogilvy)

Advertising and communication has changed immeasurably over the last twenty years. But our tools for understanding people and brands remain largely trapped in the 1970s – if that. Can a missing science fill in some of the gaping gaps in our knowledge?

4) E-commerce Best Practices – Paul Rouke (PRWD) & Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Factory)

How do you design your ecommerce website to persuade more visitors to convert? What guidelines should be followed when designing product and category pages? Learn guiding principles for making changes to your ecommerce website that will significantly increase your conversion rate.

5) Rapid Fire Landing Page Critiques – Paul Rouke (PRWD), Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Factory) & Rob Jackson (Conversion Thursday)

Your landing page stinks – it’s just a question of degree. Bring your URL and our experts will give you some quick and actionable tips to immediately improve performance. Guaranteed to be an educational and entertaining session.

6) Plus lots more engaging and insightful sessions

Along with these 5 reasons to attend, take a look at the day 1 and day 2 agenda to see what other sessions are on which may interest you.

Use #ConvCon to follow the conference live

If you are unable to attend you may want to keep any eye on the #ConvCon twitter hashtag which I expect will be getting used extensively during the course of the 2 days.

Further resources on conversion optimisation

If you are looking for more resources on usability and conversion optimisation, view my up-to-date list of articles, case studies and presentations – Conversion Optimisation Resources

What you’ll find here is:

• Usability & conversion optimisation articles for lead generation
• Usability & conversion optimisation articles for e-commerce
• Tools that you can use to monitor & improve your website
• Conversion rate optimisation case studies
• inks to presentations & slides from events & conferences

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you at the conference!

Following Dave’s presentation I felt compelled to write up what I felt are some of the key ingredients to how Dave does his stuff. So here goes…

1. Roam around the stage
2. Use plenty of single image slides
3. Tell real life stories
4. Reference things that have driven you on
5. Know your content inside out
6. Don’t conform to the usual presentation style/delivery
7. Engage the audience
8. Take the piss with some of your content (particularly data & graphs)
9. Use clever, striking photos, not the usual stock photography crap
10. Don’t take yourself too seriously
11. Grow your hair

I chatted to Dave after my presentation, and he was upfront in saying that he presents very regularly, although doing something regularly doesn’t necessarilly mean you’ll become a master in it – but Dave sure has in my opinion.

Anyway, you can follow Dave on Twitter and read more about him on his blog and his Linkedin profile.

Right I’m off to grow my hair…

My 35 minute presentation (shown below) focused on 3 key areas that businesses need to consider if they want to make serious improvements to their online performance, and all on working with smaller budgets than what they would have had pre-recession:

• Understanding visitors – using gorilla user testing to actually begin understanding what visitors want and why they don’t complete their objectives
• Measuring performance – its not good enough to just have analytics installed on your site, you need to be looking at goals, funnels and developing advanced segments to truly begin understanding visitor behaviour
• Testing and improving – using split testing to make continual, incremental improvements to conversion rates, click-throughs from key pages and overal website performance