PAINFUL LESSONS LED TO THE CREATION OF THIS BOOK.

In late 2005, I (Khalid) had the opportunity to lead the design and implementation of one of the largest ecommerce websites in North America, with a huge budget: $15 million. My team of 20 senior ecommerce developers and I built a “feature-rich” website that integrated with several external systems in a miraculous three months. While I pushed my team to work harder and spend more nights at the office, the marketing team assembled first-year revenue projections: $500 million!

Excitement built as the go-live deadline was approaching. However, I still had concerns: will visitors come to the site? On the go-live day, I sat with the other two architects to monitor the server’s performance. I was wrong. The website received tens of thousands of visitors during the first hour. Everyone was ecstatic. Yes, visitors were coming.

As the hours passed, though, my earlier tension built up again. Despite the site receiving tens of thousands of visitors, customers placed fewer than 10 orders in those first critical hours. Ten orders was all we had to show our client for their $15 million investment. It was a disaster.

Why weren’t these visitors converting into customers? Looking back, the low number of orders wasn’t at all surprising.

We worked with an ad agency to create the design for the website. During the three months of implementation, we never discussed conversions, or even orders. In most cases, a few technical people, with little usability experience, decided how to design different pages, where to place elements, and how visitors would flow through the website. Both the technical and design companies promised the client a lot and delivered a great-looking website. It just did not convert.

That painful experience was not unusual. As more companies moved to the Web, most of them focused on driving visitors to their websites—the more eyeballs a website gets, the greater the chance that orders will be placed. However, the percentage of visitors placing orders was small compared to the total number of visitors. Marketers noticed this, and the practice of conversion optimization was born. While other areas of online marketing have developed tremendously in the past 15 years, conversion optimization is still in its infancy.

We started our practice in 2006 with a simple goal: create usable websites that visitors love, and generate more orders from these sites for clients. Consulting on conversion optimization projects suffers from the same problems as consulting in other fields. The quality of work a client receives is dependent on the skill set of the consultant working for them. Some clients we talked to felt that conversion optimization, while promising, involves random guessing and a lot of finger crossing. Since the early days of our company, we knew we had to establish a process and follow a methodology to generate consistent results for clients.