Oliver Walker on Future-Ready Website Optimization | Hookflash Interview with MarTech Edge

1. How can businesses balance user experience (UX), and conversion rate optimization (CRO) for maximum impact?

User experience and conversion rate optimisation (CRO) go hand-in-hand. One is the discipline user research, understanding user requirements and best practices around things like accessibility and design. The other is the mechanism, or process, to allow you to test different experiences against another. By utilising both together you should be able to drive better experiences on the website, with confidence in only deploying new features, components or functionality if you know they are going to positively impact your website. At the very least, you should expect the changes won’t harm them!

2. What are the most common website optimization mistakes, and how can businesses avoid them? 

The most common mistake is not testing changes to a website. We’ve seen multiple pieces of research that has converged around a similar figure – the likes of Optimizely (80%) and Google (70%) have both found that the majority of changes don’t do a thing to improve engagement and conversion rates. And some of those will even make those metrics worse. It’s really important that you’re using data to understand challenges, but then also using data to validate that the changes you’ve made to address those challenges is a positive one.

3. How has the role of website optimization evolved with the rise of mobile-first and omnichannel experiences? 

We will always be guided by data and as you would expect the majority of B2C sites now have more traffic on mobile sites. As a result, there’s a much heavier weighting towards website optimisation on mobile. For some B2B brands, we still see the majority of traffic on desktop, and as such, our research and efforts would pivot that way too. More broadly, we see an increase in, and advocate for, connecting experiences together from media or CRM to touchpoint to website. This “symmetrical messaging” has generated incredible results when we’ve deployed it and it’s as simple as targeting experiences based on the presence of a certain value in the landing page URL. For one client, we saw a 46% increase in conversion by tying the PPC ad to landing page experience more closely together.

4. What emerging technologies are set to redefine website optimization in the coming years? 

AI is disrupting all areas of marketing and business, and website optimisation is no different. Most of our technology partners are embedding agents within their platforms, so you can either ask them to support with insight generation, suggestions for new web page layouts, or even to build out those experiences so that they can be tested. Likewise, those platforms are leaning into the analysis and categorisation of users into different buckets depending on “digital body language” to allow you to personalise experiences. For example, some users might be researching or just more conscientious in wanting to review more information. You should give those users a different experience to those you can infer are in buying mode or are more impulsive and want to simply get through the purchase process as quickly as possible.

5. How can businesses prepare for the future of privacy-first digital marketing while optimizing their web presence? 

This is a two-fold answer. The first is ensuring that you maximise the data you’re able to collect whilst respecting user privacy and the relevant legislation in your country. The second is ensuring you’re using your collected data to fill in the gaps on those users and sessions where you couldn’t collect their data. On the first point, there’s a multitude of steps you can take to ensure you’re best able to measure and optimise your marketing and website. From looking at server-side set-ups to very specific solutions like Google Tag Gateway, they help to mitigate some of the solutions that block tracking as a by-product of blocking ads. Likewise, collecting first-party data and sharing that back to the media platforms to allow for ad to conversion matching (amongst other things) helps increase the amount of data these platforms have to use in their algorithm. On the second point, modelling is a critical component in helping to optimise in a privacy-first way. Whether you’re using Google’s own Advanced Consent Mode – which tracks users who reject cookies in a cookieless way and utilises modelling off the users who accepted cookies to fill in the gaps – or you’re doing your own modelling, it’s a natural step to take to ensure we’re working with as much as we can.

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