Hi Ashley,

thank you for raising awareness of this fantastic field.

I have been advocating my clients to look at optimisation before they proceed with any massive marketing drives whether SEO, PPC or social media marketing campaigns.

And just to confuse your list, I've gone with the correct spelling of "Conversion Rate Optimisation" :)

Thanks

Kamal

Web Strategy 360

Econsultancy Web Strategy 360 profile

Web Strategy 360 website

Web Strategy 360 twitter account

Hi Ashley,

This is a great post and is still something that is highly overlooked by a lot of organisations. The key is educating them to execute optimisation (on the up and downstream of projects) in an effective and purposeful way.

You are also right on the money with how companies are specialising instead of becoming one-stop-shops, and this exposure to the specialist approach will hopefully start to outline the benefit to clients of each of the different, individual aspects of the digital arena.

Our company Sticky Panda is a Digital Strategy and User Experience agency that specialises in online performance and customer behaviour to try and make a successful mix of business and customer objectives. We provide the service to clients direct as well as other digital agencies, so please get in touch!

Kind regards,

Azlan Raj

Digital Director, Sticky Panda

Sticky Panda website : www.stickypanda.com

Digital blog : www.phailanx.co.uk

Email:

I thought it worthwhile to summarise the Logan Tod & Co view of the Independent Optimisation Consultant market and how we see it evolving. In particular I will try to explain what we see as the drivers for the development of this niche and why external consultants are now hired by many companies to tackle three distinct areas.

1. Marketing optimisation

The optimisation of online marketing campaigns is done by all agencies of note and internally by many client organisations. Given the predicted growth in online marketing and the dramatic changes in budget allocation this area is set to become very much more important. Currently this area is tough because of all the different tracking tools (usually poorly configured) being used, the issue of attribution and the dramatic under investment in understanding campaign performance.  We still find it extraordinary that clients use their agencies to report on the effectiveness of their own campaigns - this simply does not happen in the offline world and we don't believe it will be the norm in a mature online world.

So why hire an independent optimisation consultant?

- We work across all online marketing channels

- We include offline marketing within our analysis, and are starting to bring. econometric modelling techniques to bear to explain campaign interaction

- We are analytics ninjas who know how to analyse cross session / channel conversion using almost any of the available tools (not just GA, but all the enterprise class tools, the channel specific reporting tools and customer data)

- Most importantly of all we take a channel agnostic view. We are independent, our analysis is free from channel bias as it does not matter to an independent consultant which marketing techniques are used, what matters are the results achieved.

2. Site optimisation

Typically this is more of an internal program run by the client company, though some build agencies do offer it as an additional service.  Almost always it is an under resourced area, though usually the organisation has plenty of inaccurate and confusing data and does not know what to do with it. It is also worth noting that the days of making simple user interface changes to make a big difference in conversion rate are mainly gone for larger clients since most sites now offer adequate usability. The issues now are loyalty and persuasion, creating the desire and momentum to buy repeatedly, rather than removing usability roadblocks.

So why hire an independent optimisation consultant?

- Typically independent consultants are technology and solution neutral, so advice is free from bias and simply focussed on achieving results

- We have experience at dealing with the issues and exploiting opportunities. We collate and create best practice from across our client portfolio which we then bring to bear on each engagement

- We provide additional expert resource and skills that can be bought in to fill gaps and work alongside the existing team.

- Consultants are more able to affect change across departments or teams or at a senior management level

3. eBusiness optimisation

As Andrew points out above improving conversion rates is easy - halve prices and stop marketing - and this shows the fallacy of pursuing a conversion rate optimisation program alone. Profit is what independent consultants are all seeking to deliver, and as Dr Dave Chaffey writes optimising marketing and the site experience are but two elements of improving online business performance. To really make a difference an independent optimisation consultant must also look at the wider issues such as:

- Strategy & proposition

- Business processes

- Staff & skills

- Systems and fulfilment

- Technology platform

The goal of this work is to identify from a business perspective the real constraints to building an effective profitable online presence. The assumption that the constraint is marketing or even the site conversion rate is frequently wrong and the real issues actually lie much deeper

This area is much closer to the work management consultants do, but needs experience and detailed understanding of the online space, coupled with deep analytical skills and the ability to create and deliver much larger change programs. This is classic consulting territory and all the usual reasons to hire a consultant apply. 

How does this view of the world compare to your experience? I would love to know!

Matthew Tod

CEO

Logan Tod & Co

Ashley how could you overlook one of your own! Only joking, but as one of the Econsultancy industry expert training team I would certainly throw my (PRWD) hat in to the 'conversion optimisation and site performance consultants' ring.

Alongside ourselves featuring in the Econsultancy 2009 User Experience Buyers Guide, I'm so far surprised not to see more of the other 25 usability specialists that are profiled putting themselves forward. In this buyers guide I was also pleasantly surprised that almost all of my industry insights that I provided as part of our profile submission are featured.

Echoing comments you made in your post and what others have shared in their responses, my insights are very much centered around the definite shift in client focus, investment and expectations.

The shift in investment is from:

• new technology
• more features
• more functionality
• more acquisition spend

to:

• genuine customer centricity (not just the company statement)
• conversion optimisation
• advanced web analytics (segmentation, purchase/process funnels and simply using analytics to make real commercial decisions)
• testing

Or to put all this in a much more creative way, I think I'll use your 'sweating their assets' term in future if thats OK?!

Matthew Tod and others have certainly done a fine job of showcasing the benefits of hiring consultants such as myself, and the wide variety of business areas that what we do impacts on, so I won't now move on to listing out what we do and why its important.

Our homepage statement 'We will improve your online conversion rate' is our client pledge and especially in a recession it could be alot worse. On reflection I'm really tempted to do a split test to see whether 'We will sweat your assets' will improve our own conversion rate, if you don't mind me using it?

So Ashley, any chance you could add us to your original 'hit list'?! I have done a bit of cross linking for you as well if that gives us extra brownie points..

Paul Rouke

tw. @paulrouke

Thanks Ashley and everyone else who's posted - great to see so much interest in this space. At Google we're really keen for our clients to benefit from the kind of expertise many conversion consultants have.  The potential impact on AdWords ROI is huge.  To help do that, on 1 July we launched an accreditation programme for companies in this area:  Google Conversion Professionals (www.google.co.uk/gcp).  We're hoping this will help our clients find expert help more easily, and not be distracted by some of the cowboys out there.  I encourage all the experts who've posted to this thread to take a look at the criteria and apply - or let me know directly if you have any feedback on the programme.

Adrian Blair

Head of eCommerce Partnerships

Google 

adrianb@google.com