Finding the needle in the haystack: what is digital growth optimisation all about?
Digital businesses are looking for growth and growth means converting visitors into customers.
The above quote represents the cornerstone of Digital Growth Optimisation: the idea of not necessarily increasing user traffic but rather increasing the percentage of that user traffic that fulfils the desired task you want them to, whether that be clicking on our articles (like you did!) or buying a certain product. Companies like Evolv seek to maximise this percentage, known as a web conversion rate.
Optimising website design involves identifying sources of friction within the visitor’s decision-making process. For example, you visit a website and you can’t find the “Buy” button; the images are small, low resolution and hidden away. You find yourself wondering “what do I do next?” This is a prime example of digital friction.
Given that we are an AI-based website after all, we must turn to artificial intelligence to find new and better ways of reducing digital friction and improving consumer clarity. The traditional way of improving websites revolves around taking the product you already have and comparing it to one or two carefully curated alternatives. However, through using AI, one can explore a much wider range of options that is impossible to do with traditional, more algorithmic methods. In comparison, Evolv have recently began more modern machine-learning tools to aid the optimisation process, moving away from the evolutionary algorithms that yielded the company’s name.

Given that we are an AI-based website after all, we must turn to artificial intelligence to find new and better ways of reducing digital friction and improving consumer clarity. The traditional way of improving websites revolves around taking the product you already have and comparing it to one or two carefully curated alternatives. However, through using AI, one can explore a much wider range of options that is impossible to do with traditional, more algorithmic methods. In comparison, Evolv have recently began more modern machine-learning tools to aid the optimisation process, moving away from the evolutionary algorithms that yielded the company’s name.
But does all of this tweaking make a difference to a company’s overall success? Research by Forrester has shown a 400% conversion rate increase comes with making improvements to a customer’s digital experience. “The difference between a good customer experience and a bad one is 4x the revenue”. Companies can splash the cash to improve SEO, getting their website to the top of search engines like Google, but unless their user interface is intuitive and uncomplicated, their conversion rate will not change no matter how much they spend on SEO. One such example: Evolv works with one of the leading telecommunications firms in the United States; their Evolv-driven digital optimisations generated an increase in revenue (through digital streams) of $90 million in 2019. To answer the question posed at the beginning of the paragraph, yes…this tweaking very much does make a difference!
Where is Evolv looking to go in the future? For starters, creating ML models that don’t just tune websites to suit the general populace but to also customise the customer experience to the different audiences that are served by the website. Put simply, the Evolv of today can recommend certain choices to optimise web design for all. The Evolv of tomorrow seeks to be able to see which choices appeal to whom, whether putting the “Buy Now” button on the right of the screen favours teenagers or the elderly as an example.
The final question is my personal favourite: “What scares you about the future of AI?”
The more complicated our AI technology gets, the more we have to acknowledge that we can’t predict the ways in which it will be used - ethically or unethically - and the more vigilant we have to be about the choices that we make
Evolv is all about extricating that one perfect digital solution - the needle - from the haystack of possibilities out there, using AI to do so…all in the relentless pursuit to improve conversion rates. But as the power of AI grows, so does Evolv’s ability to further customise the user interface to suit a particular target audience. Could Evolv’s machine learning models be used unethically in the future? Worryingly, we cannot categorically say they won’t be. This is why, on a global scale, as the power of AI grows, the need for ethical clarity surrounding AI uses becomes greater and greater.
Images from Evolv Technologies themselves. A huge thank you to Steve Bamberger (COO of Evolv) for being interviewed by us. This article was not sponsored in any way.
Author’s Note: For those of you still reading….thank you! If you want to learn more about ethics and AI then I suggest you check out this podcast series by TeensinAI. It makes for fascinating listening.