As most PPC Hero readers know, every year we put together a list of the Top 25 PPC Experts, and in true PPC fashion, we rely on formulas and algorithms, not our opinion, to define what “influential” truly means. Inevitably, it means that well-known, established and traditionally influential experts are plentiful on the list, while other deserving experts—particularly the young, the new, the international or the female experts—are underrepresented.
The underrepresentation of female experts in particular—especially people that we personally feel are highly deserving—has troubled us for some time. So when we put together our list of Top 25 Conversion Rate Optimization Experts and found the same pattern happening, even we were disappointed.
We used the same methodology for the CRO expert list as we do for our PPC expert list: Everything is based on a formula for influence. And it’s a formula we’ve tweaked in subtle, yet legitimate, ways over the years to try and mitigate underrepresentation. We’ve increased the scope of new media channels measured. We’ve minimized the impact of traditional influence. We’ve focused on social authority as opposed to pure follower counts.
The one thing we haven’t done is add our own opinion. Until now. That’s exactly what this blog post is meant to do.
It is our opinion that the underrepresentation of female experts is a systemic problem with the industry—and most industries, really. It is our opinion that this is borne out not only in job opportunities but also speakerships, publishing, consulting gigs, social media and anything else one might measure. And it is our opinion that we at PPC Hero should not be part of the problem.
So we made a list. The list below is not a consolation prize—it’s a list of women whose commentary we read every day. Whose expertise we personally rely on to do our own jobs better. Who we’ve seen speak at conferences and who we follow on social media. This is a list of women who we expected to see on our list of Top 25 CRO Experts, and we are angry that they are not.
Presenting, In No Particular Order, The Most Influential Women in CRO:
Britney Muller
Founder of Pryde Marketing
@BritneyMuller
Britney is an entrepreneur that loves raw data, behavioral analytics, and snowboards. She works with businesses to increase their ROI through A/B testing, creative content creation, customer lead generation, industry & customer research, intuitive web design, on-site optimization & search visibility.
Joanna Wiebe
Co-founder of Copy Hackers
@copyhackers
Joanna is the author of one of our favorite CRO blogs – Copy Hackers. She provides consistently fascinating perspectives on copywriting for landing pages that inform a lot of our in-house tests. She is also one of the best speakers we’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing and learning from – about conversion or otherwise.
Anne Holland
Publisher & Co-founder of Anne Holland Ventures, Inc
@AnneHolland55
Anne is founder of Which Test Won, a top resource for any CRO experts wanting to test their gut instincts against real case study data. Her company is a consistent leader in not only conversion testing but also marketing strategy and thought leadership.
Aline Couto
Owner of Celulaideias
@alineideias
Aline is self-admittedly “obsessed with CRO” and the owner of Celulaideaias, a brazillian digital marketing agency. Her leadership on conversion topics is evident every day and her influence becomes more and more obvious in North America each year.
Brooks Bell
CEO & Founder of Brooks Bell
@brooksbell
Brooks became a pioneer in bringing the scientific disciplines of A/B testing and optimization to the traditionally subjective field of marketing when she launched her company in 2003 – One of the first CRO agencies in existence. In 2010, Brooks founded Click Summit as a unique event focused on conversion, relationship building, and knowledge sharing for testing experts across industries.
Georgiana Laudi
Director of Marketing at Unbounce
@ggiiaa
A cohort of Oli Gardner’s, she moderates Unbounce’s popular series “Page Fights”, thinks Conversion Rate Optimization is “effing awesome” and has been cracking integrated web marketing across search, ecommerce, copy, email, social, product, analytics and usability since 2002.
Tiffany Da Silva
CRO at Shopify
@bellastone
Tiffany has worked in all facets of online marketing including email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and social media. She does regular speaking engagements and consistently posts some of the most intelligent blog posts on conversion. Trust us, this will not be the last time you hear Tiffany’s name.
Naomi Niles
Designer at ShiftFWD
@NaomiNiles
A brand and user experience strategist and digital storyteller, Naomi co-runs the branding strategy agency, ShiftFWD. She is the definition of a thought leader, and is one of the few well-known branding experts that wants to focus on optimizing performance as well.
Mary D’Alatri-Ward
Vice President of Account Services at Ion Interactive
@ioninteractive
A frequent speaker at leading industry events, including Conversion Conference Chicago, Mary has demonstrated encyclopedic knowledge of the online buying cycle – including its past, present and future iterations. Mary is a go-to resource for anyone looking to create an integrated marketing plan focused on measurable impact.
Kathryn Aragon
Editor, Author and Marketing Strategist at Crazy Egg
@KathrynAragon
Kathryn is an expert on persuasive copywriting. She edits of the CrazyEgg blog and has written about CRO for a mountain of other publications including Unbounce, KISSMetrics and Conversion Sciences. We dare you to try researching CRO strategy and NOT come across something Kathryn has written.
Linda Bustos
Director of Ecommerce Research at Get Elastic
@getelastic
Linda is author of the Get Elastic Ecommerce blog. She consistently provides great information for optimizing shopping conversion rates that we’ve adapted to a number of our internal clients. On top of that she speaks at tons of conferences and provides expert insight for publications like the NYT and Forbes.
