Speakers

Mat O'Connor runs Actuate, an ecommerce agency in Manchester that gets called in when a website is costing a brand money and the team either can't work out why, or are too busy keeping the thing upright to do anything about it. He's been in ecommerce since 2007, which is long enough to have watched the same problem come back wearing a different platform. Helmet City's storefront was rebuilt on Hyvä in seven weeks. Four seconds came off the load time and conversion went up 16%, with nothing else changed: same products, same prices, same marketing spend. Not a single A/B test, not one green button. Mat's argument is that CRO starts at the build in the same way SEO does, and that most of what gets treated as a conversion problem is a foundations problem underneath. You can usually work out which one you've got before spending a penny finding out. He started building websites at fifteen, went off and trained as an actor, and came back to it. The acting is where the interest in why people behave the way they do comes from, and it's still what the work is about - sites built around how people actually shop, judged on what they return rather than how they look. He co-organises Digital Clubhouse, a monthly gathering for northern ecommerce people, and its annual summit in Manchester. Most weekends he's out on the bike, and he'll talk to anyone who'll listen about ecommerce, CRO, cycling clothing or gearing.