At work I have spent the past few months work on a conversion testing project. We call it “The Landing Page Committee.” Very serious sounding title.
When you search for something online (and, let’s be honest, you’re usually using Google), you often see ads on the top and the side of the search results. Something like this:
When you click on these links you’re taken to a landing page that, if crafted well, is clean, to the point, and gets you to fill out your information and move to the next page. The golden rule of landing pages is that you can always get a higher percentage of people to do what you want them to do. You should always be making and testing changes to your pages.
These are usually tiny changes–for example, a button that may have said “Submit” now says “Get Started” or you ask a prospective customer to fill out three input fields instead of 7. If you test one change at a time, you’re doing A/B testing. If you want to test multiple things at a time, you’re performing multivariate testing.
Sometimes, in our–um–committee, we see improvements of 150% for one small change. Sometimes, though, we only see a 20% or 5% improvement. Or we run multiple tests and get results that are exactly the same as our original page. At this point, making small changes on the existing page is returning only incremental improvements, so we decide to start with an entirely new design.
The Referendum
Five months ago, Tim Kreider wrote a post titled “The Referendum” on the Opinionator Blog from the Times, that particularly resonated with me. Kreider discusses the phenomenon that is prevalent in middle-age where people have chosen their path in life and look to their peers to see where they stack up. Inevitably it leads to judgment.
I’m not to middle-age just yet, but I am at that point where choices are starting to be made. Important choices. Few people are at a stage where they are locked into their current life and the choices are endless. From, “The Referendum”:
Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension.
I’ve noticed this type of subtle–and sometimes obvious–judgment amongst my peers. Friends that once went out three times a week suddenly seem glued to their couch and their significant other. Exciting adventures that two years ago would have been undertaken immediately now require planning and inevitably never happen. The fear of being locked in to a place, a job, a relationship for sixty more years goes against the fear of never finding a spouse, a fulfilling job, or a place that again feels like home.
Why am I moving to Israel?
When we test new landing page designs against old designs, sometimes the new page wins and sometimes the old page wins. The only way to know what’s best is to take our best assumptions, actively test them, and take what knowledge we can from the results.
And that, ultimately, is the reason for this move. I love Austin. It’s my favorite place I’ve ever been. But it has also been a very comfortable place for me and a place that feels increasingly tapped out. There are few places to get lost and be out of my comfort zone here. I have never had the experience of being in a city in which I knew no one and in which I had no safety net.
Perhaps I’ll hate Tel Aviv. Maybe I’ll love it. The only way to find out is to test it. Because as Kreider points out,
The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.