In this presentation delivered at Stanford, Dan Siroker, responsible for Analytics & Testing at the Obama Campaign, describes how they used data to win the presidential election. He shares numbers from the online campaign and insights into how to apply Analytics to drive decision making on developing, designing, and marketing a website.
Below are the online lessons Dan Siroker (and Obama) learned during the campaign (30 min presentation + 30 min Q&A):
- Define Quantifiable Success Metrics: What are the metrics that should be used to measure success on the website?
- Cost per Click and Cost per Acquisition for Marketing campaigns
- Newsletter signup rate for website visitors
- Dollars donated per email recipient
- Dollars per pages viewed on the website
- Focus on the weakest links: increase the newsletter subscription rate - once the user signs up it easier to convert him/her.
- Never over-generalize: the importance of segmentation and targeting to improve relevance on the website.
- Take advantage of circumstances
- Question assumptions: the importance of testing and analyzing assumptions before jumping to conclusions.
