IBM visar värdet av sina redaktörer

Webbredaktörens arbete kan vara dolt. I skymundan. Och det man (läs chefer) inte ser kan heller inte värdesättas. Men IBM lyckades enkelt visa att ett gott redaktörskap ger 30 procent bättre resultat.

Testen var hur simpel som helst.

Because editors are often seen as unnecessary, we at IBM conducted a study to demonstrate their value for some of our marketing pages. We took a sample of unedited pages with high traffic from across our various business units and ran them through Dave Harlan, the editing lead for the group that creates a lot of our marketing content. We then ran an A/B test, where we served the unedited versions to a random sample of users and the edited versions to the rest of the users. We then measured engagement (defined as clicks to desired links on the page) on those pages over the course of a month.

En enkel före/efter-test alltså. Men med lika slående resultat som det brukar bli när man faktiskt har engagemang nog att mäta.

The results were astonishing.  The mean difference in engagement was 30 percent across the set of pages.

Svårare behöver det inte vara att visa värdet av en skicklig webbredaktör.