1. Trends in Technical
Optimization
WILL CRITCHLOW

2. This is going to be a weird
technical presentation

3. Your job is not answering “which
of A or B is better for Google”?

4. The future of technical
recommendations is
business cases

5. Win heartsas well as
minds

6. #1it could be
amazing

7. Medium is exceptionally fast

8. #2we’re behind

10. #3customers care

11. We had a client whose cart
showed EUR to US customers

12. We couldn’t even
persuade them to test
matching the currency to
the visitor
Until we tried Qualaroo

13. confusing for it to show
as USD when prior to
checking out then only
showing EUR

14. Quote price in U.S. $

15. Country selected was
USA price should be in
US dollars not EUR

16. If it was possible to see
the price in USD, it was
not obvious how to do
this

17. The first page showed
my purchase in
American Dollars, but
checkout was in Euros

18. Win mindsas well as
hearts

19. Do your recommendations pass
the Bezos Test?

20. Great forecasts are stories, not
numbers

21. Put all the
Excel in the
appendix.
No-one will
read it. Sorry.

22. ASSUMPTIONS beat ANSWERS

23. Decisions should be
data AWARE
not data DRIVEN

24. How to forecast
Examples are for illustration only

25. #1bottom up

26. We have 10,000 location
pages that aren’t indexed.
This change should get
80% of them indexed. Each
should get a minimum of N
visits / month from search.
That results in $M

27. #2top down

28. The total search volume
for nail salons in our target
cities is X, by building this
new section of our site, we
can capture y% of
that, resulting in $Z
incremental revenue

29. #3based on tests

30. When we made this
controversial change on a
small section, it resulted in
an uplift of x%. If we get
80% of that uplift across
the whole site, we’ll get an
incremental $Y

31. #4case studies

32. We are planning a domain
migration. Other people’s
experience (moz 1, moz 2)
indicates a drop in the a%-
b% range for somewhere
in the C weeks to D weeks
range

33. As you start forecasting
more, you’ll find you need to work
on bigger ideas that are more
likely to move the needle

34. Then you could easily do some dumb things

35. “You can’t possibly
succeed without
graceful degradation”

36. Err.

37. “You can’t possibly succeed
without graceful degradation”

38. “You can’t possibly succeed
without graceful degradation”

39. “You can’t possibly succeed
without graceful degradation”
Does
nothing

40. “You can’t possibly succeed
without graceful degradation”
Goes
to a
blank
page

41. I want to talk about some great
sites

42. Imagine you’re pitching this guy

43. Don’t be responsible for stopping
this guy building great stuff

44. Thanks.
Any questions?
WILL CRITCHLOW
will.critchlow@distilled.net
@willcritchlow

45. What were all those sites in the screencast?
http://www.teehanlax.com/story/social-portrait/
http://www.teehanlax.com/story/shipwire/ [http://www.shipwire.com/]
http://www.teehanlax.com/story/readability/
http://www.teehanlax.com/story/teehan-lax/
http://www.cabletv.com/the-walking-dead
http://erfgenaam.submarinechannel.com/en/
http://www.photo-mark.com/funhouse/chess/
http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/the-jockey/
http://hypervenom.nike.com/gb/en_gb
http://moto.oakley.com/
http://www.officeline.se/kampanj/
http://www.dodge.com/en/2014/durango/
https://squareup.com/careers/creative

46. Image credits
http://www.flickr.com/photos/18548283@N00/2218655624/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeleary83/2222244131/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/8137913805/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zachheller/5116640316/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/michpics17/6838794315/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephangeyer/3229631450/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/grandmaitre/5846058698/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mgarbowski/5516177047/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/steffireichert/9174005276/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/doug88888/4616496228/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/8163552292/