Are you basing your online marketing plans on the latest benchmark study? What on earth for?

A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin explain why this is foolish in Playing to Win:

Every industry has tools and practices that become widespread and generic. Some organizations define strategy as benchmarking against competition and then doing the same set of activities but more effectively. Sameness isn’t strategy. It is a recipe for mediocrity.

Benchmark studies can be interesting sources of inspiration and ideas. But they’re not a how-to manual, and you certainly shouldn’t measure yourself against them. You should be doing what’s best for your audience, not aping what your competitors are doing with theirs.

As Flint McLaughlin puts it, “best practices on the internet are typically pooled ignorance.”

Peep Laja identifies eleven common A/​B testing mistakes (his headline says twelve, but the article is missing a ninth item):

1. A/​B tests are called early
2. Tests are not run for full weeks
3. A/​B split testing is done even when they don’t even have traffic (or conversions)
4. Tests are not based on a hypothesis
5. Test data is not sent to Google Analytics
6. Precious time and traffic are wasted on stupid tests
7. They give up after the first test fails
8. They don’t understand false positives
9. They’re running multiple tests at the same time with overlapping traffic
10. They’re ignoring small gains
11. They’re not running tests at all times

In my experience, the first, fourth, and tenth mistakes are easiest to make. I’ve made them myself in my impatience to get a result, my desire to just “try something,” or my desire for a big lift.

But cutting corners to get a big lift as quickly as possible doesn’t teach you anything you can use in the future—and learning is the most valuable takeaway from any test.

Read the whole thing.

What mistakes have you made when testing?

Upworthy succeeds in driving piles of traffic not because because it uses some sophisticated new technology.

Upworthy succeeds because it recognizes that its readers are human beings, not abstract “traffic” or “eyeballs.” This is an old technique applied to the web.

As Derek Thompson explains in his report on Upworthy’s success, its writers select stories that have emotional appeal and craft headlines to pique our curiosity. They combine this with optimization techniques to find out what works best:

Upworthy has mastered the dark viral arts with a unique blend of A/​B technology and lily-white earnestness. The staff scours the Web for “stuff that matters,” writes multiple headlines for a test audience, selects the top-performer, and blasts it out on social media. It’s a deceptively simple plan that’s devouring the Internet, one Facebook Newsfeed at a time. The site nearly surpassed 50 million unique visitors in October, which suggests traffic comparable to giants like Time​.com, and Fox News. …

What’s the “secret”? An entertaining slideshow of Upworthy’s headline-writing strategies last year repeatedly references the “curiosity gap.” The idea is both to share just enough that readers know what they’re clicking and to withhold just enough to compel the click.

That linked slideshow is definitely worth reading through.

Adam Penenberg challenged the white-hat hackers at SpiderLabs to penetrate his digital life. They found fewer ways to break in than at their corporate clients—but once in, they had access to everything:

With me, however, there were fewer paths that could lead to the mother lode: my laptop, email, bank, social media accounts, and home. Once in, though, his team found few firewalls protecting my data, and mostly in the form of a pastiche of passwords and log-in credentials. These, I quickly learned, were not secure.

Sobering.

Are you looking to raise money online? These four tips may be helpful:

1. Make sure people can donate on your web site
2. Build an effective e-mail program
3. Make sure you’re mobile-ready
4. Use social media to build relationships, not to drive gifts

But the number one trick to being a great online fundraiser? Assume you have no idea what actually works.

I elaborated on these points in a presentation last week at the Leadership Institute. My full slide deck is below.