Today we went to Lunch 2.0 hosted by Widemile and Portent. Having already heard the founder of AdReady talk I didn’t get that much out of the talks since they discussed the same concepts (use testing, analytics and data to drive marketing and landing page content.) The talk would have been more relevant to me had they had tips on how what they’re talking about could be relevant to early stage startups. Sure, if I’ve raised a round I’ll likely engage any of those companies to optimize my Google Adsense spend but what if I’m on a show string budget?
Update: While walking back to the office we discussed what a self service version of AdReady or Widemile would look like, and lo and behold AdReady today launched just that, AdReady targets small advertisers:
AdReady, the Seattle online advertising startup backed by Madrona Venture Group, is rolling out a new service today called Performance Ad Library that allows advertisers of all sizes to choose prefabricated online ads and have them run on Google, Yahoo’s Right Media and AOL’s Advertising.com.
Hey Matt,
Sorry for not focusing on something more useful to you at the presentation. Are you already testing with Google Optimizer? It’s free with an AdWords account and is perfect if you don’t have the budget for a larger service. Use it to test a landing page, even your homepage may be a good candidate. It’ll get you a better page but also help you define what kind of customers you get and what they like. For testing and landing page best practices Marketing Experiments has some good free articles you can take a look at.
On a personal note, I really love what Redfin is doing. The real estate business deserves a shaking up. I wish you guys the best.
Billy Shih
Optimization Analyst