Talia Wolf, testing outcomes, and jumping from perfectly good planes – VB Engage

In this week’s VB Engage, we talk with Talia Wolf, CEO of Conversioner, and learn some of her tricks for making your website, and mobile web presence, convert better.

Oh, and we also talk about how Talia has jumped out of perfectly good planes over 700 times. That might sound like your idea of hell, but we think it’s pretty awesome.

Before Talia, Stewart and Travis talk about the latest live video streaming news, now that YouTube is allowing you to stream live with your YouTube mobile app.

And while live video on YouTube does look surprisingly like Periscope, it is baked into the same app you use to watch videos. We reminisce about that time Meerkat was popular at SxSW 2015, which is when the latest slew of live video apps really started to take off. And we also discuss the perils of building your app on someone else’s platform and why that’s a risk-laden route to market.

Meerkat, after all, is no longer with us because (largely) Twitter pulled the rug out from under it after acquiring Periscope.

Of course, this has been a recent problem with Twitter. In its heyday, the platform had a huge, robust developer community. Now, Twitter is killing access to key areas within its API, and the developer community is dying out.

While we’re reminiscing, we discuss the early days of social media and name-check iJustine, Justin.tv, and other people who don’t have the words “just in” embedded in their name. With a mobile device and an app, everyone can participate in the social reality TV wave.

This will become even truer with the launch of 5G data networks around the corner, rolling out in Asia as early as 2018. Imagine how much live video will be shared when every mobile phone is streaming 10Gbits/sec.

Facebook Live also announced that it will now allow you to have multiple hosts from two locations streaming simultaneously.

After the news, we get to finally talk with Talia Wolf. They (whoever ‘they’ is) say the “third time is a charm,” and they are right. This is actually the third time that we’ve attempted to record this podcast. Nobody likes pointing fingers, but on our first attempt, Travis totally forgot to hit the record button, and the second time, poor internet connections caused us woes that nobody should have to deal with in 2016.

Thankfully, on the third interview, we nail it. You can see Talia’s passion shine when she starts off talking about her skydiving escapades.

Of course, we’re not here to just talk about adventures at 15,000 feet — we want to know why there aren’t more companies using conversion optimization (CRO), especially as we move to an ever-mobile internet. After all, CRO is, effectively, free money.

Talia tells us that the two main reasons companies don’t use CRO is lack of awareness that it exists and lack of resources to pay for it. We discuss a VB Insight study that discovered — after investigating 3.1 million websites — that very few business make use of conversion optimization tools.

We ask Talia if the sheer number of tools is turning people off and whether you have to be a rocket scientist in marketing today. Her response:

When it comes to CRO, you need to be everything: the designer, the developer, the researcher, the analyst, the copywriter — because it is such a long process. So many things that can go wrong. It’s so hard to pinpoint the problem in the funnel, then decide what to test, then how to test, then launch the test and analyze results. To be a great CRO, it takes a well-rounded marketer that has a say in everything. There are so many potential pain points throughout the funnel to just optimize.

If you want your site to convert more, you should listen to this show. You’ll learn a lot and not just how to jump out of planes.

And don’t forget to tune in next week, when we interview Andrew Grill, the former CEO of social influence analytics tool Kred, and now global managing partner of social consulting at IBM.

And if you missed last week’s episode, check it out now. We interviewed Bryan Kramer about staying human and the rise of the chatbots.

Thanks to our launch sponsor Braintree for helping to make VB Engage possible.