I love this time every year. People are so full of optimism, vowing to keep their New Year’s resolutions and make this year the best yet. Some resolutions might stick and some might not, but the point is to make this year better than the last. Yes, that’s right – optimize 2012!

This principle of optimization can –and should – be applied to your b2b advertising programs as well. I’ll give you an example. We recently created a banner campaign for a client and even though it was performing above industry standards, it wasn’t getting as high a click-through rate as we had achieved in previous campaigns. (Plus, we have high standards at McBru and we’re not happy with being average). So we optimized…

We started by tweaking various parts of the ad and testing out each change for a couple weeks at a time to see if we could isolate that critical element that would improve our click–through rate. And lo and behold, we discovered that when we switched out our somewhat general call to action with a much more specifically worded one, we saw the click through rates double. They jumped from an average of .35 to .65 in our two test publications!

What can you learn from this? If your initial ads/plans/projects/New Year’s resolutions don’t work like you wanted, you should try and try again until you find the magic element that will improve your performance. Happy 2012!

(Photo credit: optimizedsoftwareconsulting.com)

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