2020 update: How 2020 Candidates Use Behavioral Science to Convert Visitors into Donors

I thought this was going to be an in-depth analysis of what all the presidential candidates were testing on their websites (images, headlines, etc), but it turns out only Bernie Sanders is taking this whole “website conversion rate” thing seriously.

Other candidates may be testing (for example, Hillary has Optimizely on her site and does a good job of archiving experiments), but I did not find evidence of serious a/b testing.

Why would I spend part of my day on this?

Ever since I heard Optimizely’s origin story, I’ve been fascinated by politicians running a/b tests. It’s been done for ages with TV ads, direct mail, and phone calls. And now it’s become the norm for candidates to religiously a/b test their sites.

Turns out, not so much.

Instead, Bernie is the only candidate working hard to generate donations from his website and find out what messaging/imagery works the best. Makes sense. He’s a man of the people and he’s depending on his website to deliver.

So what’s Bernie testing?

It took some effort to go through Bernie’s testing code and extract the different variation code that’s still visible. I’m a curious guy. And a conversion geek of sorts. So here are a few highlights of what Bernie’s been testing, organized by theme:

Imagery: social proof FTW!

Here’s a clean image isolation. “Bernie at a rally” vs “Old school Bernie” vs “Close-up Bernie”. The question here seems to be which photo is more endearing or will best connect with visitors.