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UX experiments / Craft & speed

Craft & speed · A/B test · replicated

Short or long ad titles: Bing's search ads experiment

Microsoft Bing · 2012

Search ads: keep the short title, or pull text from the first line up into a longer title?

Version A: Short ad title
AShort ad title
Version B: Longer ad title
BLonger ad title

Make your call. Which version won, and why? Decide before you open the result. Guessing first is what trains your judgment.

Made your call? See the result

Revenue up 12%, over $100M a year in the US.

What happened

The experiment was replicated several times over a long period. Key user-experience metrics did not drop significantly.

Why it worked

More information in the line people actually read first. The change was trivial to build and had been sitting in the backlog.

The takeaway

Cheap, boring ideas can be the biggest wins. Test the backlog, not only the roadmap.

Source

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