2012-12-31no date survives; placed at the end of the corpus

Testing Lessons from Barack Obama and Jimmy Wales

Written before 2013; no publication date survives in the archive. Platforms and services described here have changed. This is kept as a record, not as current advice.

Here are two great posts which, although they’re not strictly music related, still highlight the importance of testing various elements on your band or music website. Fundraising for Wikipedia Have you visited Wikipedia recently? You’ve probably seen a big banner like this one at the top of the page: It certainly caught my eye. For the last few years Wikipedia have always used the thermometer style imagery for their donation drives, so this change certainly stood out. A related workplace perspective is covered in Monitask’s productivity vs efficiency.

It makes you wonder though, if the old images have worked for so long, why the change? Luckily the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia’s parent group) have published all the results from their fundraising tests, which are quite remarkable. You can view all the data from the banner tests on their website, or just look at this illustration of the data by Information Is Beautiful below: “Like me, perhaps you wondered how such dating site-style ad with a gory close-up could possibly work as an appeal for funds?

Data says: very well.” Fundraising for Obama If you think an extra $44k was impressive, try $60 million! Ty White recently sent me this fascinating article on “How Obama Raised $60 Million by Running a Simple Experiment.” Shortly after announcing his candidacy, the Obama team faced a challenge that every musician is very familiar with – “How do we encourage more people to join our mailing list?” Using the layout above as a template, they tested several images and videos in the “media” section and various bits of text (like “learn more” or “join us now”) in the button. For a current measurement and audience-data reference, see Mixpanel.

You can read the full article for all the great insight (written by Obama’s Director of Analytics and founder of Optimizely, the testing software we use with all our musicians), but I’ve included some of the key learnings here. 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.

These are certainly techniques and practices that can be applied to improve the efficiency of your music marketing efforts. If you’d like to learn more you can read our Data Driven Music Marketing case studies or subscribe to this site for more posts like this in the future. #### Note: We use Optimizely for all our testing.