William Charlwood

Do you want to see more interesting ads on sites you visit?

Google thinks you do so it has introduced what is essentially a time dimension to its AdSense program.  AdSense at the moment just displays ads that are related to the content of the web page that the ads are on. Google’s interest-based advertising system will now determine which ads to show on the basis of your individual browsing history as well as the content of the page you are on. So it is taking into account sites you’ve visited in the past as well as the site you are currently on to select AdSense ads from its inventory.

This does raise privacy issues and Google is being open about this and allowing you to opt out of its interest based advertising system by setting your own Ads Preferences.

I’ve been going through one of those patches of life where there’s not enough time to do all you want to do. The internet makes matters worse - and better. I don’t know about you but I find Wikipedia is getting more and more of my attention these days and I even amend/correct/add to articles. Personally I think it’s a fantastic resource that reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation library.

Can you imagine what the world’s going to be like when the whole of Wikipedia’s information can be stored on a single USB drive?

Well you know what? It probably already can!

As of August 2007 the whole of Wikipedia was estimated at 7.5Gb so if it’s gone up 10 times since then (which is a pure guess) then you need a 75Gb USB drive. There are already 64Gb drives available from Amazon so in fact we are already in this position, especially if you allow a bit of data compression.

I wouldn’t be surprised if USB capacity tracked the size of Wikipedia’s growth for a while.

If you are doing any sort of testing then you need to make sure you have enough data to make rational decisions. I recently ran a split test using my autoresponder. What I did was send out two different emails to a relatively small list (around 400) and measured the response rates.

It was a classic A/B Split Test in other words although the sample size was quite small.

Here’s Version A of my email

Hello Firstname

Recently I mentioned a free ebook that makes me good money.

I didn’t write it. It is free to read. You don’t need to supply
an email address to get access to it.

But if you read it you’ll discover something pretty neat.
The book is quite short and very punchy.

To make it work for you here’s a very simple idea: put your
link to the book as a signature in your emails.

You can copy the example below if you want.

With best wishes

William Charlwood

PS Discover the ultimate online super tip.
http://www.supertips.com/ultimate/x/?id=104

And here is Version B

Hello Firstname

Recently I mentioned a free ebook that makes me good money.

I didn’t write it. It is free to read. You don’t need to supply
an email address to get access to it.

But if you read it you’ll discover something pretty neat.
The book is quite short and very punchy.

To make it work for you here’s a very simple idea: put your
link to the book as a signature in your emails.

You can copy the example below if you want.

With best wishes

William Charlwood

Discover the ultimate online super tip.
http://www.supertips.com/ultimate/x/?id=104

.

Spot the difference!

Actually the only difference was the use of “PS” in version A.

Initially I was intrigued to see that Version A was significantly more successful in terms of click through rates. At one point there was a 91% likelihood that its relative out-performance would be repeatable. In other words, statistically it looked as though a similar exercise done again would show that Version A generated a higher click through rate 91% of the time.But as data dribbled in, the relative response rates got closer and closer. At the moment Version A has generated a click through rate of 23.5% and Version B a click through rate of 22.7%. These click through rates are quite high for emails and often one problem you face is getting people to read them in the first place.

The figures themselves are too close to separate and suggest that the results of this particular split test are neutral which is a shame! I rather enjoyed having made what looked like an interesting discovery, namely that using PS as opposed to not using PS made a difference.

But I was wrong to leap to this conclusion too early.

Just for completeness, the subject line of both emails was the same:

A Quick Suggestion