Episode 28: Interview with Tim Ash

Tim Ash is CEO of SiteTurners, an agency for conversion rate optimization, organizer of the conversion conference-series and author of the bestseller book. Since the mid-1990s he is known as prophet and early pioneer of conversion rate optimization and well-known for his expertise in user-centered design, online user behavior und landing page testing.

Andre Alpar: So today’s OMReport is with Tim Ash. Tim, please introduce yourself.

Tim Ash: Well I’m Tim Ash, the CEO of SiteTuners, it’s an agency based in San Diego, California. We specialise in conversion rate optimisation and I also run the Conversion Conference Events Series and I’ve written a couple of books on landing page optimisation.

Andre Alpar: Right, so you’re kind of educating the whole world about conversion optimisation since very, very early on. Do you feel it was undervalued for quite a long time, and it’s just starting to get the position in the marketing that it should have?

Tim Ash: Well I think the awareness of it has certainly grown, in fact this year content marketing as well as conversion optimisation were ranked by eMarketer as the number one initiatives that online marketers are working on. But I think it’s still undervalued because we focus on traffic acquisition because that’s where the money is spent but we don’t realise that the best way to make it profitable is actually to do conversion rate optimisation.

Andre Alpar: So what do you think, will there be… I mean, how much can it grow? Can it be like tenfold as much conversion optimisation that we have to do?

Tim Ash: Well certainly there’s a need for it, as I like to say there’s a lot of ugly babies out there: websites and landing pages that are very awful, and if you think about the money there’s one dollar being spent on conversion rate optimisation for every 82 dollars spent on driving traffic, so you tell me if that’s imbalanced.

Andre Alpar: Yeah that’s definitely imbalanced! I wonder if you have like a guts feeling where it’s gonna land? Is it gonna be 1:10 or is it gonna be 1:1 or 1:40…

Tim Ash: I think it’ll never be 1:1 because you do need to spend the media and the dollars to drive the traffic…

Andre Alpar: So what’s the target where you’re developing the market to? Because you’re a major driver of the whole development, right?

Tim Ash: I see it growing by an order of magnitude eventually the companies that are very successful with it will put in kind of a lot of tools that will make it more effective but they won’t necessarily fall under a conversion rate optimisation budget so things like marketing automation or third party data and, or being able to have behavioural targeting on your website. Those aren’t technically conversion things…

Andre Alpar: So they’ll be in the marketing spend but they’ll also help the conversion optimisation.

Tim Ash: Absolutely. The goal of them will be to improve conversions.

Andre Alpar: Right. So I have the… because I’m a more SEO-focused person, I guess since last year since Penguin and Panda came out and especially Panda that targeted, like, good websites that are good for the user, I think at least since then, you know, conversion optimisation and how users behave when they come to the website is kind of on top of every SEO’s mind. Do you also feel that kind of growing need for your books, for your services and so on?

Tim Ash: Yeah absolutely, in fact I spoke many years ago at SEOMoz at their annual conference and I told 600 SEOs in the room that what they did didn’t matter, cos the way they were getting traffic there was completely counterproductive to the user’s experience.

Andre Alpar: How was the reaction? Did they throw anything?

Tim Ash: Well, I haven’t been back since, but…

Andre Alpar: Maybe this year, maybe this year!

Tim Ash: I think that you’re right that more SEOs, more PPC managers, more affiliate managers are becoming aware that conversion is central to the way they make money.

Andre Alpar: Yeah, from the PPC angle I always see things becoming more and more and more expensive so they just see they can’t spend more, so they wonder if it can become efficient. It’s kinda the angle I always hear from my friends who are more in the PPC business why they care more about conversion optimisation…

Tim Ash: Yeah, and then I would say also that even the part that you do see on the website or the landing page is not enough. If you are lucky enough to get someone’s email address, the importance of back-end systems, email marketing, marketing automation, lead scoring, data pans, some of those other things that we’re mentioning are secret weapons behind the scenes. If you’re not using those, you’re never going to be able to match someone who is.

Andre Alpar: So actually if you wanna do it the whole way through it has to, you know… You’re not acquiring customers then doing conversion rate optimisation but instead you’re kind of putting the conversion rate optimisation in the online marketing strategy when you’re planning it to be able to get all the data that you later wanna use.

Tim Ash: Absolutely right, so if it’s a long sale cycle or something with an expensive ticket item you need to think about a content marketing strategy to support every part of the sale cycle and it might start with a download in exchange for an email and that gives you the right to have an ongoing conversation with them.

Andre Alpar: Right. But what are some things you could share because you have the conference that you do worldwide, it’s in Berlin, it’s in London, it’s in the States in several cities…

Tim Ash: Paris… The US schedule is San Francisco in the spring, Chicago in the summer and then Boston in the fall.

Andre Alpar: Right, so it’s like six times a year. What are… Do you see some differences when you come to Europe? Are there like some special tics of certain nations that you can share? I mean I always remember that French people love to fill out stuff for newsletters and love getting newsletters. There’s probably more stuff you could share…

Tim Ash: And they also love to eat a lot of butter and stuff.

Andre Alpar: That’s true. No, but do you have like any national tics that you can always remember, or…

Tim Ash: Well I would say that, you know, Americans are very aggressive about data collection. We have no illusions unlike you Germans that there’s any online privacy at all.

Andre Alpar: Haha haha haha!

Tim Ash: So we’ve just given up on that idea. So it’s OK to use tactics that are a little more in-your-face and collect information. I think in countries like the UK and Germany especially it’s harder to get information out of people so you kind of need to give them more content upfront and establish trust that way before you ask for anything in return.

Andre Alpar: Right, so who are mostly your customers, are they mostly people that have like a certain service online… like one, you know, big huge page selling service, like a dating website or is it mostly ecommerce websites, or travel websites… what are, you know, what are your… do you have a focus area? Or like really broadly…

Tim Ash: The answer is all of the above. We’re horizontal specialists, we focus on conversion but we have a significant practice in ecommerce, another one in business-to-business lead gen, and the rest is business-to-consumer lead gen so we worked in all those industries… in travel, lots in ecommerce, lead gen for financial services, consumer products… you name it. Nestle, Intuit, Google, Facebook are all our clients. We also have a small business division so we do help small businesses…

Andre Alpar: So how big is SiteTuners, if I may ask?

Tim Ash: Well we’re pretty large and growing. We’re no Google, but…

Andre Alpar: OK. Isn’t it hard to… because… at least in Germany, because I don’t know how the… what the market HR-wise look elsewhere, but… In Germany it’s really hard to get people who have, you know, experience and skills in that area. How do you educate your people?

Tim Ash: Well I think it’s a deeper market in the US, and we have a core, we’re based out of San Diego, and we have a core of senior consultants and grown-ups that are responsible for themselves that we work with nationally, so we’re drawing from that national pool, and because of our thought leadership and stature in the industry we can attract the best people. We also have to train quite a few, so we found that backgrounds in writing, in psychology, in usability are all a good starting point and then you have to cross-train them in all of those other areas as well.

Andre Alpar: Wow! Do you also sometimes help clients educate the people who work with you? On the client’s side?

Tim Ash: Yeah it’s interesting you ask that, we actually have three main practice areas. The first are best practices, redesigns or cleaning up websites, so kind of a blueprint for a high-converting web experience. The second is of course testing and test strategy development, and the third is knowledge transfer, so mostly with our enterprise clients we do a 360 degree company assessment and then teach them to fish, if you will, by getting the right organisational structure, the right skill set on their team, the right accountabilities and support of upper management, so it’s really kind of being a change agent inside of their company.

Andre Alpar: Wow! That’s quite deep, but do you also like, when you’re going to a company and try to kind of educate, do you try to tell different stories to different, let’s say, target groups, like the tech guys you would tell something else than the upper management? How does that differ, you know, or how many different kind of target groups that you have to talk to in their individual language, do you, you know, do you have in your mind when you think of, you know, bringing it into an organisation?

Tim Ash: Well in my book ‘Landing Page Optimization’ I have a whole chapter devoted…

Andre Alpar: Can you show it please?

Tim Ash: Well absolutely, I’d be glad to…

Andre Alpar: It’s right there, it’s like the classic, you have to have this book!

Tim Ash: Well thank you, that’s very kind of you! In the book I have a whole chapter devoted to kind of the politics of organisational side of pulling this off inside of your own company and definitely the mind-set of IT people versus agency and branding people is radically different and of course there are other stakeholders as well. You do have to speak to them in their own language, but I have some strategies in the book for kind of how to co-opt them in to get them to see the benefit of what you’re doing for them.

Andre Alpar: How did you become what you are? What have you done before?

Tim Ash: Haha haha!

Andre Alpar: No I mean it’s… Is it a fair question to ask?

Tim Ash: It is a fair question.

Andre Alpar: Because it is quite a unique position you’re in, I think, because you’re one of the thought leaders on this topic so I was wondering, like, how did you get there?

Tim Ash: Well in retrospect it seems like it was a pre-direct line because as an undergraduate I attended University of California, San Diego, had a dual major in computer engineering and cognitive science which is in the psychology department, so hardware and wetware, if you will, or software and wetware! It combined them both. Internet marketing is this interesting mix of being very accountable, granular and measurable, and at the same time needing that art of the psychology, the neuro-marketing, the direct response copywriting that takes the other side of the brain, so I like to think I’m using both sides.

Andre Alpar: Right. So, you mentioned the other department is the one where you redesign websites?

Tim Ash: Yes.

Andre Alpar: So do you, like, try to make a blueprint without even looking at what the customer’s actually doing? Kind of trying to, you know, without the, let’s say, probably narrow view of the customer, how they think of their website and their product, do you try to, you know, do it on a really white paper and then see how your crazy, maybe, weird new ideas come together with the thoughts of the customer and then find something that’s in between or how does it usually work out?

Tim Ash: Well we have two main flavours of redesigns: what we call the strategic jump start and the tactical jumpstart. A lot of companies come to us and say ‘We want higher conversion but we’re not gonna switch content management systems, we’re not gonna change… programme anything new, we don’t wanna change our information architecture. Can you help us?’ That’s a tactical jumpstart. We can still move the needle, but not as much. It’s a… basically, what can you do from a visual and usability standpoint on key pages on our site and to clean up the user experience. The strategic jumpstart is much more rigorous. It’s basically when it’s time to blow it up and bring in the bulldozer and start over. And the key there is really there’s a very deep step of understanding your customers. We come up with use cases or user scenarios.

Andre Alpar: Like personas or groups of customers?

Tim Ash: No, personas I think are actually not that useful. They’re, you know… ‘Mary is a cosmopolitan Manhattanite that likes to go to bars on Saturdays.’ That doesn’t tell me how she would buy shoes.

Andre Alpar: Right.

Tim Ash: You see what I mean?

Andre Alpar: That’s an interesting topic and we have a client in that area. No worries.

Tim Ash: OK, well I’ll be glad to chat about it. But what we found is that you create personas based on our matrix… architecture… basically getting the right people through the right tasks in the right order, so we identify roles of people showing up at the site, what specific tasks they’re trying to accomplish or what their intention is on that visit, and then we grade the site experience against that, so you get a kind of narrated walkthrough of your site experience so we assign a letter grade to that, or a number grade I guess in Germany. We fail a lot of our clients, but it gives us the insight by kind of walking a mile – or kilometre – in our visitors’ shoes.

Andre Alpar: Don’t worry, we’ll get the mile.

Tim Ash :…that we find out exactly what’s wrong with the site and that’s a… we don’t jump just at information architecture or wire-framing right away, you have to understand what’s broken before you try to fix it.

Andre Alpar: And you do that for all the potential customer groups and their tasks that they want to accomplish? For each of them you do a walkthrough, grade it…

Tim Ash: Exactly. And that’s a disciplined way to make sure there aren’t any holes in your web experience. And then we’ll take that through to information architecture, wire-framing and then visual mock-ups. We found that if you just hand off wire-frames to designers they’re gonna decorate the pages and destroy their focus and their intent in what the business purpose is. So we give guidelines and take it as far as kind of the layered photoshop stage of rough visual designs.

Andre Alpar: Wow. That’s quite a bit. That’s quite operative, one could even say.

Tim Ash: Yeah no, you could, if you wanna make it a little more on-brand or polished that’s fine, but you can’t change the visual focus on the page and you can’t distract from the business purpose of it.

Andre Alpar: You also said you clean up the pages: it sounds like you take away a lot, or is that just a misrepresentation of mine?

Tim Ash: No, no, when you’re talking about the tactical jumpstart and as far as the user experience goes, yeah from an SEO perspective we might say ‘Get that text off the top of the page…’

Andre Alpar: Noooo!

Tim Ash: Just the top of the page! It can still be on the page, but you have to remember why it’s there. It’s really not for Google’s algorithm…

Andre Alpar: I know the discussion, yeah.

Tim Ash: It’s there for your visitors.

Andre Alpar: That’s true.

Tim Ash: And more and more Google cares about the visitor experience.

Andre Alpar: Definitely, that’s why I’m saying, you know, more and more SEOs care about conversion rate optimisation: are people staying on my page or are they bouncing away and pogo-sticking or are they really, you know, enjoying what they’re catered to? All right then thanks so much for your time, Tim. It was great meeting you!

Tim Ash: My pleasure. Thanks.