‘All Killer, No Filler’: The Next Web finds the right message with Google Optimize 360

In a world where consumer behavior can shift on a dime, marketers constantly ask themselves: How can we be more useful to our customers? With all the data businesses collect, the challenge becomes tuning out the noise to focus on insights your team can act on.

Today’s most successful businesses have turned to a new approach: building a culture of growth and optimization. This is where everyone in an organization is using data to test and learn as a means to improve the customer experience every day.

The Next Web, a technology-media company and online publisher, has embraced this testing culture and turned to Google Optimize 360 to help them find just the right message to drive readers to their conference website.

The Next Web Case Study

The Next Web’s conferences bring tech leaders, entrepreneurs, and marketers together to innovate, share, and look ahead. The first TNW conference was created in 2006 by Patrick de Laive and Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, when they couldn’t find the kind of event they needed to showcase their own startup.

That first event drew a respectable 280 attendees, but the founders knew they needed a better way to promote future TNW conferences. That’s when they launched thenextweb.com, a tech news and culture website that today attracts 8 million users a month. The Next Web’s two annual conferences in New York City and Amsterdam now draw over 20,000 attendees.

The Next Web’s marketing team uses promotional messages within articles on thenextweb.com to drive potential attendees to the conference website and sell tickets. To find out which combination of messages works best, they used Google Optimize 360, an integrated part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

“We want more people to read content on thenextweb.com as a first step,” says Martijn Scheijbeler, who leads the marketing team’s efforts. “If we can convince them to become a loyal user, we can try to interest them in different opportunities. In the end, we’d like them to join us at one of our events to experience what The Next Web is really about.”

With one of its conferences coming up, The Next Web’s marketing team wanted to compare different headlines and descriptions to see which combination would drive more readers to its conference page. Using Optimize 360, The Next Web team ran a multivariate experiment to discover the combinations that worked best.

For The Next Web, the results were clear: The “All Killer, No Filler” headline with the “This one’s different, trust us” description was the winner. During the experiment it performed 26.5% better than the original headline and description, with a 100% probability to beat baseline.

Today The Next Web team tests and optimizes its conference messages day by day. Better messaging means more traffic to The Next Web conference site, and that means more attendees. It also gives the marketing team extra wins like higher awareness and more newsletter signups.

“Optimize 360 and Analytics 360 make testing easy for us,” Martijn says. “They give us much better insights into how many clicks we’re getting for each message. We’re reaching more people who want to come to our conferences, and those better results are going right to our bottom line.”