Dan Siroker gave a fascinating keynote speech at the Website Optimiser day at the Authorised Consultants summit yesterday. One of the stories he told of his time on the Obama presidential campaign really brought home to me the power of testing - and the importance of remembering not to trust your instincts!
The landing page of barackobama.com was a pretty simple proposition - a large image or video, and a call to action underneath, which would lead you to sign up to be emailed by the team and asked to donate to the campaign.
Dan asked the audience of web optimisation professionals to guess which photo or video, and which button text, had led to the most sign-ups. There was some variation, but all in all we pretty much plumped for an inspirational video, and a button that said 'join us now', or something similarly imperative.
First, Dan revealed that these were pretty much what the campaign team had expected to do best too. Then he revealed that in fact, the best converting page had had a picture of the Obama family together, and a button that said 'learn more'.
It wasn't what any of us would have thought - but then, if we could tell what was going to work, we wouldn't need testing, would we?
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
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