CTA Conference Day 1: Highlights

Our team is thrilled to be at the CTA Conference organized by Unbounce, the leading landing page service provider. So thrilled, in fact, that our head honcho, Krishna, was prompted to put together his favourite moments from Day 1:

When I first heard of the tool in around 2012 I felt it’s just another easy drag and drop landing page service. As we custom build all our landing pages and fine tune them to get better conversions, I felt their product was not for us. Also, the difficulty to add various tracking codes then was a challenge. So we never really paid attention to this tool. I have to admit however, they came a long way in providing a proven service serving a number of clients. Unbounce solved the “build landing pages fast” without programming skills dilemma. For businesses or agencies who don’t have a lot of resources, this tool is a life saver to quickly test multiple landing pages for A/B testing or multivariate testing. We highly recommend Unbounce to anyone looking for an easy to setup landing page solution.

– Disclaimer: We are still not a customer of Unbounce. –

Machine Vs Marketer – Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in landing page optimization

Being a technology focused marketer, there is one booth that caught my attention, it is the “Machine Vs Marketer” AI based tool that grades the landing pages up to 80% accuracy. The team was very excited to announce this new technology. They gamified the application to do some real-time testing (at least in our opinion). All players grade a page whether it passes the “landing page test”. You are competing with the machine (AI) to see how well a human vs AI can perform. They ran a contest to choose top 20 from the leaderboard to go on stage or at least be announced. Well in marketing terms these top 20 people get to have the bragging rights for life, which in my opinion is well deserved. Going through the 250 odd pages, squinting through on a mobile or tablet and trying to win, wasn’t an easy task. Bravo to the top 20!

We wanted to play along as I like challenges! What’s the verdict? I ended up in Top 22, at least for now; at the time of writing this article.

How did I perceive this tool Landing page grader?

When I started playing my first thoughts are, this is an awesome idea. Made me think some of the AI our awesome David Sword coded internally to be more productive and reduce human intervention on some tasks. We truly believe AI is here to stay and changing many industries.

We definitely hope to see this tool evolve into something much, much bigger. A tool that can create landing pages on the fly based on various data inputs including end user demographics, behavioural cues, and some sort of emotional sentiment.

As much as I liked the concept of saving time and deciding on a best landing page playing the game on a mobile was painful. I should have installed the app on my tablet. Once I started playing, I noticed if I logged out of the app, it will delete all saved information. So I had to zoom in and out all pages.

What are our takeaways from testing this tool AI Vs Marketer:

Kudos to Unbounce team to be bold with this awesome concept. I can’t possibly put myself in every scenario when I tested these pages. For example, testing a “university landing page with lot of text but they give away a scholarship” or being a wanderlust traveling to Ladhak in India.

I am assuming the following should be constrains in grading a landing page:

• Layout of the page
• Number of fields required to complete
• Which fields are required and which are not
• Is there a CAPTCHA?
• Amount of content on the page
• Sizes of the pictures on the landing page
• Location of call to action placements
• How many times the call to action is repeated
• Possible colors
• Font size and colors. What type of font?
• Who the page is targeted to a 25yr old vs a 50yr old
• Is there video? Is there no video?
• SSL – I assumed all pages are secure but couldn’t tell, I never gave my information to an unsecure page
• Bounce rate from past experience

We’ve probably missed a few details, but you get the picture. There’s a lot of small, key integral parts of the landing page which can be the difference between conversion and losing the user.

I am not sure if AI tested various fields on landing page, including if it is a compulsory field. I believe they are comparing each field entry with an average landing page experience for that type of field.

The following is where I’m not sure if we can use AI for landing page testing,

• Industry weighting – there needs on be a benchmark and additional signals
• Sentiment from text on page – some pages have words or colors that’s appropriate to the page but invoked negative emotions
• Long disclaimers – some pages have long disclaimers, this can vary from industry to industry, not sure if this is considered to grade a page
• Cultural limitations – I noticed landing pages with a ton of convincing text and videos do well in certain countries
• Emotional state / intelligence – not sure if the AI can be considered what time of the day or what my emotions are when I visited the page. Could we use facial recognition or posts from social networks?

If you have tested the AI tool please let me know your thoughts. I guarantee that many will agree with the observations above but I love to hear your opinion.

There were about 1,300 attendees from 22 different countries. So I am assuming there are things I may have missed in my observations. Like any conference there are exhibitors which included different marketing optimization tools and Unbounce internal development team showcasing the Unbounce product. The most exciting part is the sessions short and sweet, to the point from marketing industry leaders. Definitely a big shout out to Oli Gardner, co-founder of Unbounce for his epic presentation despite some technology issues. It wouldn’t be a tech event if there wasn’t a tech malfunction.

Well done CTA conference for an awesome day 1!