Twenty-four marketing experts got asked to describe the most surprising or exciting result they've ever achieved in an A/B test. The answers from professionals ilke Aaron Levy, Greg Meyers, John Lee, and Oli Gardner reveal some interesting and "crazy" results. For Levy, a tweak produced an increase in conversion rate by nearly 50%. Gardner, for example, tested a paid search campaign that gave back a 85% return in people opting to give their email address.

Holiday campaigns this year will likely include digital coupon and rewards programs. Michael Amar provides a list of questions that marketers may want to answer before getting started. Begin by determining campaign objectives. Then map out traffic plans, create viral promotions, and align digital campaigns with online and offine brand stategies. Consider iTunes and Amazon gift cards as an incentive to increase loyalty or sign-ups for email and SMS referrals.

Yandex on Tuesday launches a comparison shopping service enabling users to compare online clothes and footwear. Shoppers can pick from nearly a million products -- apparel and footwear -- from hundreds of retailers in Russia and Ukraine. A video on the site walks shoppers through ways to pick sizes and products. The search engine said consumers do about 2.4 million searches on Yandex per day, and 1.5% of all search queries are about clothes, shoes, or accessories. Click to translate the site into English.

Apple is looking to hire former Google employees who worked on Maps to build out its iOS Maps platform, according to TechCrunch, citing a connection with both companies. Seems logical that the company known for turning the music world upside down would want to recruit employees with experience in building out the app. The obvious attention given to this position on the Apple jobs board points to building out the maps app. Multiple job openings in Santa Clara Valley indicate a focus on the task.

Law enforcement often turns to Google Street View to get a closer look at homes and buildings prior to mapping out a raid or investigations, but a picture took an "eerie turn" when one of Google's street cameras captured a man pointing a gun on a front porch in Detroit where a 17-month old baby died earlier in the year. 

Million Short launched it own version of the Bing It On challenge against Google to prove the fledgling search engine offers an alternative to search results. The engine removes the top million search results that would typically appear on Google and Bing. It digs deep into content to locate information that is not readily available on other engines. 

Always expand a keyword list, but over time ad groups can get out of control. If marketers use this practice they need to look for new keywords rather than expand the list. Add new ones, but remove the old ones. Keep ad groups to four to improve quality scores. The hour-long webinar provides seven tips on righting the top seven of the worst paid-search "best" practices.

Bob Tripathi takes us through the process to conduct a link audit, from improving PageRank to anchor text distribution to competitive benchmarking. Tripathi points to a common error among companies with mutliple sites, and the need to analyze competitor link acquisition strategies and the types of sites linking to them.

That's what execs at a Chinese search engine, Qihoo 360, must have been thinking when the company paid million of dollars for the domain name. Techinasia.com reports that Qihoo CEO Zhou Hongyi explained that aside from So.com being a short and easy URL to remember, "'S' stands for 'safe' and 'O' stands for 'open' in English." It follows Qihoo's strategy, which began as an anti-virus business focused mainly on selling and promoting security.

SEOmoz has been been exploring ways to look at ranking data during the past few months, and has reported on metrics like domain diversity and EMD influence. Now the company is rolling out five of the top-view metrics on MozCast, updated daily. The metrics include domain diversity, SERP count, EMD influence, and more.