I created Bigger Buy Button University to be a resource for people who want to learn more about optimizing search advertising and landing page design. In my experience teaching this topic as a university professor, there are four general skill areas organizations or people need to master to get their web sites really working for them:

• Executing search engine advertising campaigns that attract visitors.
• Analyzing web visitor behavior to know what it is they're really doing.
• Designing landing pages that persuade visitors to become customers.
• Executing experiments to determine the most effective landing page design.

For each of these areas, I survey both conceptual approaches and nitty gritty implementation details. For implementation, I mainly examine Google services such as AdWords for search advertising, Analytics for analyzing visitor behavior, and Website Optimizer for landing page experiments. These Google services are free, state of the art and, at least in the case of AdWords, hold market dominant positions.

The material here is based on practical experience and deep theoretical background. I personally manage a $60,000 annual AdWords spend for the educational non-profit, Michigan Innovators. Across the classes I teach each semester, students can manage upwards of $500,000 in annual AdWords spend.

As for my background, I have a PhD focused on fast-paced decision making from Carnegie Mellon University, an MBA in Marketing and Decision Sciences from the Wharton School, and a BS in Linguistics from Georgetown University. I've been on the web almost from when it started in 1992.

Finally, if you've read this far, you deserve to know where the name Bigger Buy Button University came from. It's inspired by Chris Goward's enumeration of standard techniques for increasing landing page conversions. First among them: Make the buy button bigger and more prominent.