[LanceJones]

Interesting headline on the HN post. Joanna and I at Copy Hackers respectfully disagree. A properly-designed split test will ALWAYS produce a result -- you'll generate negative, positive, or neutral lift. And no matter what type of lift you achieve, you can ALWAYS learn from the test.

We just concluded an 11-site split test where we changed nothing but the home page headline -- written as a value proposition -- and we produced 9 of 11 "winning" tests, with an average conversion increase of 34% on the primary KPI (and the 34% includes the "losing" tests).

Bottom line is (from our many years of testing copy)... you have to change meaningful things to create conversion lift. And "meaningful" means in the eyes of your visitors.