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How The Huffington Post Utilizes The Awesome Power of Split Testing

John Jorgensen — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:22:56 +0000

A great article on NiemanLab.org explains that at a conference earlier this month, The Huffington Post’s chief technology officer Paul Berry revealed to the audience that for the first 5 minutes an article is live they run an A/B test that displays two different headlines to their readers.

Thanks to The Huffington Post’s awesome amount of traffic, 5 minutes is enough to get statistically relevant data on which headline their readers respond to the most.

You can instantly see the power of this. Headlines are notoriously the number one factor that decides if someone reads an article or not.

I’m not surprised that The Huffington Post is the first major news site to split test their headlines like this (that we know of). The kings of old media journalism are still largely stuck in their old ways of doing things, slow to spot and adapt to new opportunities in the marketplace.

The Huffington Post started online. It never had an offline distribution model because in 2005, they understood they didn’t need one. They are so great at “online” because they never had an “offline” history they have to evolve from.

No long-lasting traditions that are slow to be re-examined. No “time-tested” ways of doing things that have to be grown out of.

This gives The Huffington Post a great advantage — the advantage of nimbleness, of being able to spot opportunities and take advantage of them rapidly without having to get the approval of the old guards.

Let’s see how fast the other guys follow suit.

Why Yahoo's $100 Million Ad Campaign Would Be Better Spent Improving Their PPC Advertising Platform

John Jorgensen — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:22:32 +0000

Yahoo is getting ready to launch an ad campaign costing $100 million:

The new tagline is “It’s You!”—ads feature the Yahoo graphical “Y” and exclamation point in them—as created by WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather. The campaign will seek to tie together some new features Yahoo has been adding lately meant to update its image, as more and more users get their content from social nets than portals.

Meanwhile, their pay-per-click search marketing platform leaves a lot to be desired.

They still don’t have an offline editor, much to the chagrin of search marketers everywhere.
Yahoo’s Account Optimization “feature” – where they kindly go into advertisers’ accounts uninvited and add keywords and write ads for their campaigns – got them a ton of backlash from the search engine marketing community. The best part? Advertisers have to opt-out, not opt-in to the program.
Their interface simply looks like crap.

Yahoo’s priorities are in the wrong place. If you were high up at Yahoo, would you focus on imitating as many elements as you could from Adwords — the PPC platform that made Google 97% of its revenue last year (and 99% the year before that) — or would you just say screw it… let’s drop a hundred mil on some billboards.

Yahoo, there’s a reason you’re falling behind… “It’s You!”

UPDATE 9/22: I think it’s hilarious that during the same week Yahoo announces this $100 million ad campaign, Netflix announces they have awarded their $1 million prize for the contest they announced three years ago that allowed any programmer in the world to take a shot at improving their movie recommendation engine predicting what Netflix customers would like to rent next.

It was a huge success and was 1/100th the cost of Yahoo’s branding push.

TC50 Winner 'RedBeacon' Points to Local Search Evolving… Are You Prepared?

John Jorgensen — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:27:22 +0000

For those who aren’t familiar with the TechCrunch50, it’s a big conference each year put on by Michael Arrington (of TechCrunch) and Jason Calacanis where 50 startups present before a panel of judges to compete for recognition and prize money, with hopes that the former may lead to serious venture capital funding.

This year’s conference just ended, and the grand prize winner is RedBeacon, a company that is like a Yelp for local businesses.

People can use the site to search for local businesses in their area and are then presented with a list of featured businesses along with user reviews.

The company was founded by ex-Google engineers and product managers.

So today, some of the technology’s best minds got together and bet on a theory that most have come to view as inevitable: the way people find local businesses online is going to continue to change a lot in the coming years.

The internet has done a miraculous job of connecting the world, but we are still figuring out how to connect people to their plumbers next door. As solutions like AdWords (and perhaps RedBeacon) emerge, it’s hard to say which model will come out on top, but you can be sure that forward-thinking business owners will be there to reap the huge rewards that come with showing up early to the party.

Most small businesses owners haven’t yet figured out how to really harness the power of Google AdWords to drive traffic to their website and customers to their door. The businesses that have gotten themselves a steady stream of AdWords traffic have found that being a small fish in a big pond can be very profitable if their competitors haven’t had the courage or know-how to test the water.

Have you experimented with any new avenues for your online marketing recently? Have you stepped into the AdWords arena, or have you been waiting on the sidelines while your competitors figure out how to utilize this platform to make more money than they ever could before?

I don’t know what’s going to be the local business finder of the future, but what I can tell you is that there is a business owner down the street from you who is making very real money on AdWords as you’re reading this.

Whether that means opening an Adwords account today yourself, going back to one that’s been collecting dust, or finding a knowledgeable AdWords professional to outsource your campaign to, there’s no better time to start becoming comfortable with the change that is sure to continue sweeping local business search.

Just ask RedBeacon.