Free Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres Page B

“people look at the upper left-hand corner first” or “people look at red more than blue.” Roche responds, “In the real world, an ad is competing against so many other inputs. There’s no such thing as a controlled experiment. They cling to a sandcastle of truth in a tsunami of other information.” It’s so cheap to test and retest alternatives that there’s no good reason to blindly accept the wisdom of academic axioms.
    It shouldn’t surprise you that the smarts at Google are also riding the randomization express. Like Offermatica, they make it easy to give consumers different ad experiences and then see which ads they like best. Want to know whether your AdWords ad for beer should say “Tastes Great” or “Less Filling”? Well, Google will put both ads in rotation and then tell you which ad people are more likely to click through. Since the order in which people run Google searches is fairly random, alternating the order of two ads will have the same effect as randomizing. Indeed, Google even will start by rotating your ads and then automatically shift toward the ad that has the higher click-through rate.
    I just ran this test to help decide what to name this book.
The End of Intuition
was the original working title for this book, but I wondered whether
Super Crunchers
might instead better convey the book’s positive message. So I set up a Google AdWords campaign. Anyone searching for words like “data mining” or “number crunching” would be shown either

Super Crunchers
Why Thinking-by-Numbers
Is the New Way to Be Smart
www.bantamdell.com
OR
The End of Intuition
Why Thinking-by-Numbers
Is the New Way to Be Smart
www.bantamdell.com

    I found that random viewers were 63 percent more likely to click through on the
Super Crunchers
ad. (They also substantially preferred the current subtitle to “Why Data-Driven Decision Making Is the New Way to Be Smart.”) In just a few days, we had real-world reactions from more than a quarter of a million page views. That was good enough for me. I’m proud to be able to say that
Super Crunchers
is itself a product of Super Crunching.
    Who Is Usefully Creative?
    A common feature of all the foregoing random trials is that someone still has to come up with the alternatives to be tested. Someone has to have the idea to try to sell two sewing machines or the idea to have a research firm call a week in advance. The random trial method is not the end of intuition. Instead it puts intuition to the test.
    In the old days, firms would have to bet the ranch on a national television campaign. On the web, you can roll the dice on a number of different campaigns and quickly shift to the campaign that produces the best results. The creative process is still important, but creativity is literally an input to the testing process.
    In fact, the AdWords randomization feature could provide a great test of who can write the most effective ad. Ad agencies might think of testing applicants by seeing who is able to improve on a client’s Google ad. Imagine an episode of
The Apprentice
where the contestants were ranked on their objective ability to optimize the mass market sales of some popular web page.
    The potential for randomized web testing is almost limitless. Randomized trials of alternatives have increased not just click-through rates and sales, they’ve increased the rate at which web forms are completed. Randomization can be used to enhance the performance of any web page.
    That includes the layout of online newspapers. The graphic designers at Slate, MSNBC, even the
New York Times
could learn a thing or two from randomized testing. In fact James Roche, the president of Offermatica, says that they’ve started to do some work for web publications. They are typically brought in by the subscription department. However, once “the editors see the increase in online subscriptions,” James