In a new regular column, Marketing Experiments reveals how choosing product, service or domain names based on subjective preferences alone can lose you money.

In a recent series of tests we used PPC advertising to find out which names and domain names actually delivered the highest clickthrough rates.

In one example from the tests, we asked a number of online marketers to select which of four product names they felt would be the most effective in engaging the interest of potential purchasers.

Here are the product names, ranked by the subjective preferences of our panel of expert marketers:

As you see in the chart, our live audience overwhelmingly chose "Investment Profile Library" as their favorite name.
However, in actual PPC testing, the results were quite different:

This chart shows that "Investment Profile Subscription" performed 9 percent better than the worst phrase ("Investment Profile Library").

As you can see, had we followed the opinions and judgment of our expert marketers, our research partner would have stood to lose a great deal of money.

We found the same lack of reliability when asking marketers to identify the most compelling domain names.

You'll find the full set of research results in the Marketing Experiments Domain/Product Naming Brief.

The Marketing Experiments Journal publishes primary test results from work with our research partners once every two weeks. Subscription to the Journal is free and gives you full access to both our archives and teleconference calls. Subscribe here.