CNN Money recently published an article about the Obama campaign opening an office in Silicon Valley and mentioned Optimizely:

Siroker helped bring the idea of “A/B” testing to the Obama campaign, segmenting the viewership of BarackObama.com to test how different pictures and messages affected donations and volunteer sign-ups. He’s now running a startup, Optimizely, that sells the kind of testing technology Siroker created for the campaign.

“He built a team of analytic experts who had these giant monitors,” says Sam Graham-Felsen, who was the campaign’s chief blogger in 2008. “What they were doing is testing every possible combination or iteration that you could imagine, like the color of the donate button on our website. Is blue or red a better ‘donate’ color? Is it better to say ‘donate now’ or ‘donate please’?”

Felsen estimates that the sophisticated tests helped the campaign raise an extra $75 million dollars.

“Because it worked so well, that’s the kind of thing the Obama campaign is doubling down on now,” says Felsen, who is now a freelance digital strategist and speaker. “Everything they do is going to be highly rigorous and scientific.”