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:

1.  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.
    

2. 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.
    

3. 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 interpreted the results of your test.  If you get inconclusive results, it's ok to say so.)
    

4. 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) on Friday, April 9.