Most company blogs are giant ads. What matters though is this article still provides value despite being an ad. I agree that this is wonderful marketing.
Indeed. I thought it was particularly clever how he apparently used the campaign data, but ran it through his product to get the "experiment results" screen shots.
I assumed that was Google Website Optimizer or whatever they actually used back in 2008. If not, they should make that clearer.
This post is an ad and at the same time an effective demonstration of the usefulness of advanced multivariate A/B tests. This dual purpose content/ad is very relevant to this community because we care about usability and good UIs. So while being a self-promoting piece it is also a well written tutorial of sorts.
It was educational and informative. It wasn't until you mentioned it as being an ad that I went back to see who actually wrote the article. You increased it's effectiveness by focusing on it...and now even further. ;)
I don't mind that to be honest, because it's a product that I may end up using. It provides a real value, just like the ad did. :-)