Optimize Or Die… Or, Just Read A Book

Optimization is a popular topic these days. People like to optimize everything from website conversion rates (“will I get more sales if I change this call-to-action?”) to calorie consumption (“will I lose weight if I eat more kale?”). But what does “optimize” really mean?

The dictionary definition of “optimize” is “to make something as good as possible.” But what most companies don’t consider about optimization is that what’s “good” for one company may not be good for another. A conversion rate that’s very good for a company selling a high volume of inexpensive products to a wide audience may be devastating for a company that sells a few higher price products to a targeted audience. Because company goals vary so widely, it can be very hard to standardize what’s “good” across companies into a single set of best practices.

Turn best practices into test practices

That’s why we need to turn best practices into test practices (our conversion rate optimization motto!) and test everything. Our latest webinar, Optimize or Die, takes you through a number of split tests we ran that produced very different results for different companies. For example, a change that increased conversion rates for one company actually decreased them 15% for another. Good thing we tested that, right? Watch the full webinar here to see additional enlightening tests in action.

Read or die

After listening to the webinar, you’ll probably be motivated to dive in and learn more about optimization. So we put together – sorry, we optimized – this handy list of the top 10 optimization books just for you, the digital marketer. Check them out to learn a thing or two about what it means to optimize ­– and how to be sure that you’ve actually optimized:

Top 10 Optimization Books

1. Conversion Optimization by Saleh & Sukairy

2. Call to Action by Bryan Eisenberg

3. You Should Test That by Chris Goward

4. Your Customer Creation Equation by Brian Massey

5. Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash

6. Always Be Testing by Bryan Eisenberg

7. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

8. Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik

9. Practical Web Analytics by Michael Beasley

10. Experiment! by Colin McFarland

We didn’t want to be so self-promotional as to include our own book in the list, but we do know that it’s full of helpful tips on conversion rate optimization. So check out our free ebook on CRO for Digital Marketers.

And if you haven’t watched our webinar yet, what are you waiting for? Optimize or Die!