3 Roles that Need the Conversion Toolbox

The online marketing landscape is turning SEOs into conversion specialists, conversion experts into content marketers, content marketers into usability professionals, and PR experts into … well, we’re not really sure yet. But what we are sure of is that roles are expanding and converging. For online marketing professionals, there’s no quicker path to obsolescence than ignoring these shifts, and failing to get cross-trained.

That’s one of the reasons we’re big advocates of expanding your toolset, whichever field you are coming from. Here are the three roles that stand to benefit the most from SiteTuners’ Conversion Ninja Toolbox.

SEO professionals and web analysts

Here at SiteTuners, we love us some Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and WebTrends. Traffic monitoring is valuable even as we head into 2014, and you should absolutely be capturing and segmenting this information. But no matter what you do with your search and traffic data, there are a few things web analysts can’t get from just behavior: things like tasks the visitors are trying to perform, how successful the visitors are at finding what they need, why your prospects are failing to find information.

Google Analytics may be enough for the casual web observer, but professional analysts need to dive deeper. If you combine tasks you get from iPerceptions or Kampyle with your standard GA or Adobe Analytics data, you’ll get metrics that tell you about user success rate and how that impacts the bottom line. This, of course, is one of the best ways of determining what to fix.

Design professionals and usability analysts

Just as the line between SEO and CRO is blurring, there’s a convergence happening in the design and usability fields. (SiteTuners has held a webinar with Motivate Design, a company who is charging through on this front)

Regardless of whether you are a designer with UX training or a UX expert with design experience, it’s undeniable that the field you’re operating on is experiencing a massive shift. With tools like AttentionWizard available to validate design feasibility before something gets launched, or Crazy Egg heatmaps that tell you how well something is being received, there’s no excuse not to inject a massive dose of intelligence into your existing processes.

From wireframes for GUIs at the beginning of the process to speed improvements and cross-browser tests after launch, you can get Fortune 500-level data for a fraction of the cost, if you know where to look. Now, all you need to do is learn the tools, and training is dead-simple.

Conversion analysts

If you’re more of a traditional conversion expert, there’s plenty of room to expand the toolset. ClickTale allows you to beef up your diagnostic tools by allowing you to review user sessions for high-impact pages, UserTesting lets you collect direct feedback for your chosen conversion tasks on the cheap, and Loop11 can zero in on your site’s task accomplishment rate to help you choose which problems need fixing the most.

BONUS: Of course, there are plenty of other roles that can use a dash of additional data for intelligence. So the next time a slow page tanks your conversion, and IT says that’s really, really, REALLY as fast as the page can be constructed, you might just want to fire up YSlow and have that debate.