Dan Siroker: If Data Can Help Win Elections, What Can It Do For Your Business?

Most people are familiar with the story of how the first Obama campaign harnessed split testing to build their war chest for the election. Regardless of your political views, it was a big win for analytics. With the general election on the horizon, we thought it would be a good time to repost this for all to see and understand.

So here is Dan Siroker, the man behind the analytics on the Obama 08 campaign. Dan gave us some great insights into what analytics can do to help win elections, but more than that, he lays out a framework for any company getting involved with split testing. Along the way he looks at some commonly asked questions: how can smaller organizations with relatively small data sets use it to generate long term value? and how can you get buy-in for A/B Testing in a business?

Slides

Dan siroker data testing and business business of software conference 2013 from Business of Software Conference

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Dan Siroker

Famously, Dan served as the Director of Analytics during the Obama 2008 presidential campaign. While there, his team relied on the use of A/B and multivariate testing to maximise e-mail sign-ups, volunteers, and donations to raise more than $100 million in additional revenue for the campaign.

But optimization was hard — you needed technical skills and know-how to run even the simplest of tests. After the campaign, Siroker teamed up with Koomen to create a world-class optimization platform that was easy to use in an effort to provide a platform for businesses to be able to conceive and run experiments that helped them make better data-driven decisions.

Since completing YCombinator in the winter of 2010, Optimizely has seen strong and growing demand.