Lessons Learned
- Every visitor to your website is an opportunity. Take advantage of that opportunity through website optimization and A/B testing.
- Question assumptions. Everyone on the campaign loved the videos. All the videos ended up doing worse than all the images. We would have never known had we not questioned our assumptions.
- Experiment early and often. We ran this experiment in December of 2007 and reaped the benefits for the rest of the campaign. Because this first experiment proved to be so effective we continued to run dozens of experiments across the entire website throughout the campaign.
Lots of great lessons in this post on how the Obama campaign used multivariate testing to optimize. I’ve learned in my own testing that you can spend all the time in the world trying to get inside the mind of your users, and doing what you think makes sense only to find the exact opposite is what ultimately works.
Life Putting 