A coworker and I attended another downtown Seattle Lunch 2.o with an insightful informal discussion with Portent Interactive and Widemile. Hats off to Josh Maher for organizing this tech synergy and tasty food.

Portent Interactive, who helps organizations “realize exponential growth using the Internet”, presented an interesting Time of Conversion vs. Conversion Rate research study based on 10 sites over a one-year period, including 7 e-commerce and 3 non-e-commerce. Based on their data, direct to site, organic search, and pay per click have the highest generated revenue with less conversion time. Surprisingly, their data indicates that video, social networks and corporate blogs have the longest conversion time, with lower revenue. I wonder how a similar study would compare in the next coming years as the social network adoption rate increases (i.e. Facebook) and video delivery continues to improve.

Widemile, who “optimizes conversion rates with multivariate testing, presenting a case study of the Weather Channel Interactive. Their initial goal was to improve conversion (of the landing page) by 30% and the actual increase was by 225%. The incorporation of Flash significantly outperformed any static counterpart. It sounds like their testing methodology is solid and they know what to do with the numbers to move forward.