"That would have been a huge mistake since it turns out that all of the videos did worse than all of the images."<p>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.
The "Learn More" button and this whole page are spammy. I remember being annoyed by this splash page, I just wanted to get to the main site. When users saw the "Sign Up" or "Join Us" buttons they probably realized it was an email phishing form and then searched for the hidden "Continue to Website" link. The "Learn More" button otoh seems to be what you are looking for, an escape, but when the button complained about the missing email some users probably went ahead and entered it even though they didn't want to because it seemed like the only way into the site.
The best thing about this article is that it is a giant ad. Informative, educational and useful, but an ad nonetheless.<p>Wonderful marketing and great article as well.
Kind of a side note, a complete noob when it comes to A/B, I tried out Optimizely after reading this and I've gotta say, this thing is put together well. I think I created 6 variations for our home page in about 2 minutes, saved it, and started watching results flow in. Amazing execution.
He seems to assume that the contribution and volunteer rate of the added marginal people (those who signed up after seeing the best performing media / button, but would not have signed up with the default media / button) is as good as the rest of the people (those who would have signed up regardless).
$400/month for 200K visits? The pricing seems to be based on how much they'll contribute to your bottom line rather than what the market will bear, what competitors are charging, whether they should focus on growth rather than early profit, etc. This might be a great opportunity for someone to clone the business and charge 25% of their prices, which will still be $250/month for 1 million visits.
The experiment showed that video was a poor choice for Obama. Images worked better for him. However, I do not think anyone should generalize from this example. Obama was supported by specific demographics. The poor and working classes favored Obama to a disproportionate degree. These are the people most likely to still be on dial-up Internet connections. There are the people with the least access to broad band. Therefore, these are the people for whom video would be a poor choice.
<i>"Sending email to people who signed up on our splash page and asking them to volunteer typically converted 10% of them into volunteers."</i><p>Is it wrong for me to be a little startled by that conversion rate? I wouldn't have expected anything that high.
For any of those interested in seeing the Mixergy interview with Dan Siroker (founder of Optimizely), check out this link: <a href="http://mixergy.com/dan-siroker-optimizely-interview/" rel="nofollow">http://mixergy.com/dan-siroker-optimizely-interview/</a>