Jared, yes, you’re absolutely right about the importance of measuring the right thing. It’s a common issue in marketing — any idiot can drive conversions through the roof by selling their product at a loss, and send the company broke, for example. We need to measure the right thing.

However, given the post’s title, I was a bit surprised you wrote that “While more people signed up, I think we can safely assume that more won’t be interested in the book once they hear about it.” ‘Safe’ and ‘assumption’ are always risky words to include in the same sentence. I think we can speculate until the cows come home about what the actual numbers are (I agree your predictions are on the ‘wild ass’ side ) but the question I faced was simply: do I want to be able to pitch my book to double the number of people when I release it? It wasn’t hard to answer!

(Plus, my “Are you a designer?” pitch isn’t without precedent — I nicked the idea in my wildcard landing page from this beautifully executed campaign: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2779/promoting-with-banners-ads/).

In any case, readers are welcome to sign up for the book and check out the current A/B test
http://lukestevensdesign.com/book/

Obviously, the problem is that tracking such a criterion (or how many people bought the design book) is just more difficult.

Have you ever had a potential date give you a dummy phone number? Have you ever given a date a false phone number?

Of course, happens all the time.

Now guess what, it happens all the time with emails too.We all have disposable email addresses or ones we use when we think we might get spammed or hard sold from some company.

You’re exactly right, what we want to test is how many people ended up actually buying the book.

I’m doing a split test on this right now, and I have to tell you that the results are very surprising.