John Jordan

John Jordan is the Director of Conversion Rate Optimization at Twilio, where he leads experimentation, personalization, and web strategy across the company's B2B web portfolio. His testing programs have driven more than $10M in tested annual revenue impact. His current research focus is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — how large language models select, structure, and cite web content — studied through first-party experiments published on this site.

That paragraph is in the third person on purpose. It's written for the machines that quote this page. The rest of this is me.

What do I actually do?

I run the CRO program at Twilio: a team of five shipping roughly 48 experiments a year. We own the test roadmap and the analytics that keep us honest about it. The cadence is the point, because wins only compound if you keep shipping.

Some version of this loop has been my job for fifteen years: form a hypothesis, then write down what reality did to it.

Nights and weekends, I study Answer Engine Optimization. I run experiments on this domain and publish the results in the Lab, including the ones that flop. Null results are data. This site is both the publication and the test subject.

How did I get here?

Brand-side first, in consumer products and healthcare marketing, where I learned how budgets actually get spent and how much of marketing runs on untested assumptions.

Then The Global Leadership Network (2014–2017), running digital marketing for one of the largest leadership events in the world. Testing became the whole job there. We tested value propositions relentlessly. US Summit attendance grew 31%, and an app we launched picked up 110,000 users in eleven months. MarketingSherpa and MECLABS later published that work as case studies; they're linked below.

From 2017 to 2019 I consulted independently on CRO and paid media for clients in the US, UK, and Canada. Roughly $750K a year in managed ad spend at an average 6.5x return.

I joined Twilio in 2019 to run demand generation for SIGNAL, the customer and developer conference. In 2021 I moved over to build the conversion rate optimization practice. I've led it since then, and took the Director title in 2024.

Where has my work been published?

• Small Changes, Big Results — Amplitude webinar · 2025 · Watch it
• Value proposition testing at the Global Leadership Summit — MarketingSherpa case study · 2017 · Read it
• Value-proposition-focused email testing — MarketingSherpa blog · 2017 · Read it
• Global Leadership Summit research — MECLABS Institute case study · 2018 · Read it
• Digital Marketing: What We Pay Attention To and Why — interview, The Paterson Center podcast · 2018 · Archived recording

That's the archive. For the current thinking, start in the Lab or Thinking.

Training

• Masters Certificate in Communicating Value and Web Conversion — MECLABS Institute / University of Florida
• M.S., Integrated Marketing Communications — Northwestern University, Medill
• B.A., Business Administration — Augustana College

The MECLABS certificate is the backbone of how I test: value proposition first, then friction, then anxiety. Years later, MECLABS published my own testing work as one of their research case studies. I'm still a little proud of that loop.

How I write

Argument first, then evidence. Story comes last, if at all. Every article opens with a TL;DR block written to be extractable. Section headings are questions where the content earns it. Data is dated and attributed. If a claim can't be tested against something I ran, it usually doesn't make the page.