The wrong lesson from this would be to immediately try and get your sites' performance to similar numbers. But what isn't explicitly stated in this post is that at the root of it, these guys first figured out <i>which</i> metrics matter for their goals. Only then did the optimization pay back. In their case, a few seconds can make decent impact because of volume. Someone with 100 uniques/day may have a better metric than load time to optimize.
I see a lot of concern for integration with API, hosting, etc. but what I don't see is disgust. Disgust because to become president of the US, you <i>must</i> participate in this monumental financial circus of who spends what. Is this what people want? To know the best candidate will need to raise over a billion dollars to compete? Campaign costs should be in line with needs. Remember when Color got $40 mil for doing basically what other startups manage to do with a couple thousand dollars? Why would HN readers champion this kind of spending? The reasons are probably in line with the SuperPAC reasoning, which is "in order to change the game, you must play within the game's rules". Sure. But when do you say <i>enough is enough</i>? In Canada, our candidates spend on their campaign, but dollar-for-dollar, they are getting more done with less money. Somehow.
At the risk of sounding like a troll, honest question here. Why wasn't the CVV part of this page? Seems like a lot of headaches and bad press could have been avoiding by just actually including it (and you know, less fraudulent donations).<p>Great work by the way with the optimizations. As patio11 noted, add a 0 or two to your rate and point people to this blog post.
When running numbers like the A/B conversion improvements, how do you model or isolate external factors like "conversion rates increase as election draws closer". Is it correct to assume that no one is willing to continue to run original, unoptimized pages for some percent of visitors as a baseline?
Can you describe how you set Akamai to host the site? I'm familiar with using S3 to host a static site, and using a CDN to host assets, but it's not clear to me how a CDN can be set to host a full static site. Did contribute.barackobama.com just mirror something like contribute-s3.barackobama.com?<p>And why Akamai and not Amazon Cloudfront?
This is a very good example of UI optimization: <a href="http://cdn.kylerush.org/kr/images/contribute-before-after-screenshot.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://cdn.kylerush.org/kr/images/contribute-before-after-sc...</a>
Thanks for posting this fantastic write-up! I'm looking forward to reading more.<p>Does anyone know if other team members from the campaign have publicly discussed how other aspects of the online campaign worked? (Such as analytics, ads, CRM, social media, etc)
First of all, congratulations and thank you for doing the work you did to re-elect the president. Your write-up there is really interesting. I have a couple questions:<p>1. According to FEC reports, Blue State Digital made millions of dollars working with OFA... With that in mind, why is it that the campaign tech team had to build the redundant donation API? You would think for millions of dollars BSD probably should handle that, no? I only ask because in all the post-election stories a big theme is the "we decided to do it in house"...which makes sense...but begs the question - If you were "doing it all in house" then why was this third party vendor making so much bank?<p>2. Since we have you here on HN, can you tell us (very generally) what you and the other OFA Chicago Digital/Tech/Analytics people are going to be doing now? Going back into politics? Forming political/non-political startups?
I do not agree to it. Has any one seen the Obama campaign spending on software and infrastructure. They spend half a million dollar on Microsoft software (the highest spending), and then all the highlights of the campaign are coming from Open source software.<p>What was the benefit of spending on Microsoft software. Why it is always that money is spent on Microsoft and benefits are highlighted of using open source software.
Kyle, great post. You said the final donation was made via an XHR POST, did you guys have a plan B for users without JavaScript or were the numbers small enough to ignore?
Reading this write-up after having read Nate Silver's post[1] today on how the Republican party has a harder time getting Silicon Valley talent leads to an interesting thought. Going forward the party that can successfully target the younger, smarter base will have a SUBSTANTIAL advantage in developing better systems. Assuming there is not some ceiling on how much better technology can impact efficiency, these systems will translate to exponentially more effective platforms for the party with the brightest youth.<p>[1]: <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/in-silicon-valley-technology-talent-gap-threatens-g-o-p-campaigns/" rel="nofollow">http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/in-silic...</a>
Seems a little dubious to claim that the increase in donations was a direct result of increased speed. The nature of the election cycle seems like more donations would take place as campaigning ramped up and the election date drew nearer. Were those kind of external factors accounted for in your analysis?<p>Still, very interesting writeup and congrats!
This is fascinating, thank you for the writeup.<p>I have a question about the donation API though, I feel like I am missing something:<p><i>We settled on a very simple solution of turning the hosted platform into a REST API. The only big change was adding JSON as an output option instead of HTML... We consumed the newly created donation API using JavaScript on static HTML pages which were served by our CDN (Akamai).</i><p>What operations did this API handle? Were donation submissions being sent from the user's browser to this API?<p>By the way, I think there might be a bug with your PJAX code on kylerush.net - when you click links to other parts of the site or to read other articles, the page title displayed in the browser stays as the initial title from the initial HTTP request.
Great writeup, thanks for sharing.<p>I've some questions to further understand the optimization process.<p>- In general, how did you measure improvements in conversion? What metric were you using? Something like LTV or the % of conversions each variation got?<p>- How exactly did you verify that the new version had a 14% larger conversion rate? Did you run an A/B test with both?
Kyle, amazing post! You mentioned that the 60% speed increase led to a 14% donation increase. You used webpagetest.org to measure the 60% speed increase. How did you measure the donation increase? Is there some sort of A/B tool for CDNs to help quantify the impact of speed improvements on CR?
A tech* question:<p>How did you implement the fail-over to a different amazon region when one fails? I'm interested in common approaches to this SPOF and what have been done in this case.<p>*seeing the discussion that is going on around this post, it almost feels off-topic to post a technical question :)
I am curious where this will lead the next election, I think it is quite possible that 2billion mark will be broken as everyone is looking at this an will be getting ready for the next round in 4 years. It is quite depressing actually
Wow, all of that with Jekyll as the CMS generator. I've been using Jekyll to generate static sites and have been proud that mass traffic rushes don't bring them down...but I haven't used it for anything that generates real revenue
Very nice write up! :) It's really nice to see A/B testing promoted, as well as, a case for static sites integrated with web services. Those are the types of technologies I'm really looking forward to seeing grow in our industry.
Before and After Optimization - <a href="http://cdn.kylerush.org/kr/images/contribute-before-after-screenshot.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://cdn.kylerush.org/kr/images/contribute-before-after-sc...</a>
There were a couple comments about the legality of foreign donations, but I wonder whether foreigners can volunteer for a campaign.<p>Some causes are worth the hassle.
Thanks for the write-up.<p>Too bad that there were no checks in place to determine who is actually contributing. For that reason, many non-citizens were able to contribute, some from questionable places, and even Osama ibn Laden had posthumously donated, receiving congratulation later from Barrack's wife thanking him for his donation [1].<p>Since Romney was rejecting contributions that could not be confirmed as of where they came from, this race in terms of fund-rising was skewed from a get-go. Imagine a marathon where everyone runs on their feet and you -- against the rules -- are using a bicycle. Guess who's gonna win?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/obama-accepts-osama-bin-laden-donations/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/obama-accepts-osama-bin-laden-don...</a><p>For those who hate googling:<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/28/AR2008102803413.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10...</a><p><a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/10/08/exposing_barack_obamas_illegal_foreign_campaign_money_loophole" rel="nofollow">http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/10/08/exposin...</a><p><a href="http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=76534&pageid=17&pagename=News" rel="nofollow">http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=76534...</a>