Content Engineering Case 3
The purpose of this Case is
to introduce you to the concept of A/B testing your own content or your
own promotion strategies, and understanding how to act on the
information you get back.
Your employer wants to increase traffic to the company website (your
blog), to increase the amount and quality of the organic search traffic
that comes to the website, or to encourage more engagement in the
existing traffic that you receive. Therefore, she is asking that
you devise and run an A/B test on different content that you are
posting, or on different strategies to drive traffic to your
content. She wants to know how you are measuring the results of
this test, what the results of the test are, and your recommendation
for how the company can act on these results to improve the company's
website.
The body of your report should
have 4 main sections:
- An overview,
explaining how your A/B test will work, and a brief rationale
explaining why this will be an effective step toward improving your
website. I had you set up two posts last week on your site
that would be ideal for this kind of testing--the post you made with
Inbound Writer and the similar post made without it. An easy A/B
test would be to use your Google Analytics account to track the search
(organic) traffic to each of these two posts.
But you are also free to employ any other type of A/B test you like.
I've shown you how I've tested two different "video information" styles
in my youtube videos to drive traffic to my site. I've also shown
you how I've tested two different methods of linking YouTube videos
inside Reddit to measure the difference that makes in traffic.
You could also do an A/B test for engagement by measuring the
bounce rate for different posts.
Any A/B test you come up with is OK, as long as you
can make a valid case that the data you get back can help you improve
your site, or improve your traffic.
- A section reporting your
data, the results of the test. This is the raw data, the
numbers, presented in a format that is designed for the end user of
your report.
- Your interpretation of
this data. What does the data mean? Is it
conclusive, or inconclusive? (Note: If your data is
inconclusive, that's ok. Your grade for this assignment is
determined by how well you set up, carried out, and interpretted the
results of your test. If you get inconclusive results, it's ok to
say so.)
- Your recommendation for
the best way to act on this data. If your data was
conclusive, you should have an easy time with this one. If your
data was inconclusive, perhaps you should recommend a different way of
doing the test.
Email the final
report to me, exactly the way you would if I were your boss.
Think about how you will format your attachment, what text should be in
the body of the email, what the subject line should be, etc.
Final drafts of the report are
due to me (via email) by class time on
Thursday, November 17.
Return to the syllabus. |