How Obama Raised $60 Million by Running a Simple Experiment
blog.optimizely.com
blog.optimizely.com
It annoys me no end when websites have videos explaining their product and no equivalent text. I hate watching videos about products. Always make the video optional and secondary.
I can read a lot faster than they can talk and I could have read a lot of other things in the time it takes to watch a video. I also have a lot of things I want to read and nowhere near enough time to read them all. In fact, there was an article here on HN that linked to a bare video. I was going to read the article, but when I saw it was a video, I closed the tab immediately.
So be sure to test and make sure, but remember that there might well be a lot of others like me who would rather read than watch a video.
If I can download the video, I do that and watch it on my trainride home.
Else the window gets closed
If we start testing everything, we'll just be stuck testing the whole time! There are an infinite number of things to test, if there is a large and credible study showing one particular thing to be true, and no "anti" study, then I will just accept it and not retest it. Rather, I test things unique to my product or presentation.
Running a test, particularly a multivariate test is not an easy or quick task. It requires a lot to do it properly, and if I had to do hundreds of them, I'd be wasting a lot of time.
Most times as a small company, one should not be focusing on if a button is red or green, but on if you are at all in the right business.
Such small-scale and detailed testing is really a way to stick your head in the sand, when larger optimisations or corrections could lead to a much much bigger jump.
I hate watching a 5-minute video when I could skim-read a 30-second block of text instead. But I'm not necessarily representative of the population as a whole. And specifically as it relates to text over video, a huge number of people are finding that video converts better than text for their audience. YMMV.
But it may be that even if the majority of people feel like that the people that will watch the video will convert better than the people that will read or skim-read a block of text.
No explanation beyond the video (more than two minutes runtime), not even a hint at what Dropbox is doing on that page. You have to click if you want to know what Dropbox is. Did they test that? Does it work because it is hard to concisely describe all the strengths of Dropbox? Maybe it works because the main vector for the recruitment of users are invitation emails which do include a short description of Dropbox?
Wonderful marketing and great article as well.
And of course, you can simply validate it by seeing if it is the same going forward.
We didn't measure the average contribution for each variation for this particular experiment but in future splash page tests we measured eventual $ per pageview for each variation and it was very closely correlated to % signup rate.
$400 is not a lot of money when you probably demonstrate increases in revenue. (It is a fraction of BCCs gains from A/B testing. Nationwide political campaigns, Fortune 500 companies, and real estate firms all have slightly more money to spend than BCC does.)
1.) Obama had disproportionate support from the poor and working classes. This is easy to verify, there were many news organizations that covered this. Here is one example:
http://geocommons.com/overlays/6095
2.) The poor and working classes have less access to broadband Internet. Is anyone seriously going to dispute this?
3.) Therefore video was a poor choice for Obama, since many of his supporters lacked broadband Internet access.
My friends, instead of downvoting, why don't you explain what you are thinking? Does someone disagree with my thesis? I feel like I'm stating something fairly obvious here.
1) Your source cites the November 2008 exit polls. The campaigning mentioned in the article was being done through 2007, when Hillary Clinton still had her hat in the ring. Now, it's hard to use campaign donations as a gauge of support for presidential candidates (particularly among people who are too poor to even afford broadband). However it's easy to point out that Hillary Clinton's platform was more beneficial to the working class, whereas Barack Obama's vague Yes-We-Can appealed more to broadband-connected hipsters like me. As you can see from About's (pro-Clinton) US Liberals blog[1], half of the Obama campaign chest going into 2008 came from individual donors, whose email addresses were harvested on websites just like the one described in the OP.
2) I'll also dispute the claim that the poor have less access to broadband, having grown up so debilitatingly poor myself. In America, internet access is cheap, and even for the poor, the value of a fast, reliable internet connection far outweighs the cost. Those who are remain on dial-up connections are residents of low-density rural areas where broadband is unavailable. These people are a) unlikely to have been Obama supporters, and b) unlikely to have gone around donating campaign money on the Internet.
3) Barack Obama's was the most Internet-connected campaign in US history. If dial-up users were as large a chunk of his support base as you say they were, he would have spent a lot more time going door to door in Des Moines, and a lot less time on YouTube.
[1] I wanted to link to the New York Times article, but it's probably more informative all around if I just link to a blog which quote-mines it. At least About.com doesn't make you log in. http://usliberals.about.com/b/2007/07/19/hard-truths-about-d...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide
While it admits to several definitions of the divide, it mentions broadband access as one aspect of the problem.
My original point remains: Obama had disproportionate support from those population segments that were likely to have limited broadband access, therefore video would be a poor choice for him.
The larger point is that you can not generalize from this one example, mentioned in the originally linked article. Video was a poor choice for Obama, but might be a good choice for a new web startup that is pitched to a demographic where broadband access can be assumed.
1) The digital divide between classes is negligible compared to the divide between rural and urban dwellers, particularly wrt broadband access[1]. Also, n.b. class based Internet analytics is prone to error, since the poorest segment of America lives in remote rural areas where broadband access is unavailable to begin with.
2) As I pointed out above, the OP was in reference to 2007, when the Democratic candidacy was still up in the air. Further, Barack Obama drew support (particularly individual campaign donations) from young Internet-savvy people, whereas the real blue-chip donations went to Hillary Clinton (and to a lesser extent, Chris Dodd). Your data is from the exit polls in 2008, after the Democrats had (more or less) formed into a united front.
This makes your larger point untrue[2]. The data from the Obama campaign indicates that these particular videos were less effective than the images, and to assume this is due to bandwidth complaints is specious at best.
[1]http://pewinternet.org/Media-Mentions/2006/Rural-areas-laggi...
[2] Well, it is true that you can't generalize from this one example, and that video may still be a good choice for web startups, but not for the reasons you suggest.
If you make $200K a year, then you are in the upper 1% of income in the USA.
When I said "poor and working classes" I was thinking of the bottom 2 quintiles of income distribution. I think this is a fairly common reference. Certainly the usage is common in articles that write about the demographics of elections.
You realize there are more votes in the lower 40% than in the top 1%?
Is it wrong for me to be a little startled by that conversion rate? I wouldn't have expected anything that high.
It depends on how much of a commitment they're asking from volunteers. If you've already signed up on the website it's not much more to volunteer to pass out fliers at your office. If they want you to work a benefit or something than ya I'd agree it's a little high.
Keep in mind too that these are people who have already actively signed on to support the campaign.
A few theories:
1) Maybe the feeling of not committing by pressing the button made people more comfortable signing up to be a volunteer, figuring that it probably wouldn't be too much of a commitment
2) Maybe the content on the Learn More page was just so good that the only thing that really mattered was getting more people onto that page and they would be comfortable
3) Perhaps the type of person more likely to click after seeing the picture of the family (Stay at home moms perhaps) was more likely to have time/desire to volunteer.
As I think about it, assuming that one of these ideas is right which is probably not the case, I would guess that it's #3. I don't know the demographics of the people who volunteered but around me it seems like it would be the moms who go to the site, and they would probably be more likely to be skewed toward clicking with the family and non-committal button, while also being more likely to have the time to volunteer.
Disclaimer: This is pure, assumption based, uninformed speculation of the worst kind.
After that they send you the e-mail with the suggestion to volunteer. So 10% look impressive.
You are correct. All of the variations would redirect to the home page regardless of what the button said.
So 10% look impressive.
Keep in mind that this is the percentage of people who volunteered at some point during the campaign after signing up on our splash page-- not the percentage of people who immediately decided to volunteer after signing up.
The startlement is an indication that your predictions were bad and you should update them.
So you never expected anything that high. So ... what?
Why are you startled? What are you asking? In what ways could being startled be "wrong" of you?
VSA Partners on the Logo:
Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etEP1Bhgui0
Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukIMW833EPE
There's a ton of info out there on Obama's campaign, it's really one of the best branding and marketing success stories.
You can also read "Barack Obama Social Media Toolkit by Edelman" : http://www.scribd.com/full/10807015?access_key=key-nc75wovez...