Many internet marketers have quit talking about the
importance of tracking, or just forgotten about it all
together. Many others know that tracking is something that
they should be doing, but don’t fully understand it
or think it is too much trouble and not worth the time and
expense. Not too long ago, this might have been the case,
but now online business tracking programs are so cheap and
easy to use that not taking advantage of them is almost
like an online business suicidal attempt.
To help you understand the importance of tracking,
let’s go ahead and start with the basics. What can
you track and test?
Headlines, sales letter introductions, calls to action,
PS’s, audio, video, testimonials, sales copy layout,
sub headlines, bullet points, highlighting, yes and thank
you pages, post payment, payment pages, subscriptions,
subscription box layout, subscription box presentation, the
use of entry pages, lead generation, affiliate signups and
sales letters, training, education and what effect that has
on your visitors, affiliates and customers, subject lines
for your mailings, layout, html, text, web based content,
all aspects of the follow-up process, backend sales, front
end sales, price, traffic quality, cost per visitor,
keywords, visit times dependant on content, titles and
headings in your sales copy, your ads, your signatures,
your introductions, subscriber conditioning, length of
subscriber stay, customer feedback, presentation (of
everything), and the list goes on and on.
As you can see there is always something to track and test.
If you own or market an internet business and you’re
not at least keeping a close eye on your statistics for
patterns that might emerge, then your online business is
probably not running nearly as efficient as it could be.
Unless you start now that is.
So how exactly do you go about tracking and testing
effectively? First, I want to make sure that you
understand that over a short period of time with few
visitors, this isn’t an exact science. Nothing will
ever flow with any perfect regularity. A technique that got
you 20% more sales or signups straight after implementation
may well turn out to actually lose sales compared to the
alternative over the long term.
In order to track accurately and learn from your tracking
you have to get a decent set of stats. Judging your sales
material over 100 visitors isn’t going to do much for
you. Judging it over 3,000 to 5,000 however will give much
more accurate results, and that results will only continue
to get more and more accurate the more results you collect.
This will also allow you to ignore any problems that might
come about through anomalies and average out your results.
If you start analyzing you’re tracking stats without
enough traffic, to many factors come into the equation that
can throw off your data and make it appear better or worse
than it actually is. Were you getting the same quality
traffic from the same place? Was it more targeted than
previously? There are lots of things that can affect your
results. Averaging out over a long period of time is the
only way to ensure that what you have in front of you is
reliable.
Secondly, only test one thing at a time. If you’re
going to change the wording of your ad to see if it
performs better, than test one sales letter with one
headline, and one with another. Whatever you do,
don’t change six things on one ad, and then proceed
to change four things on your second. You might see a
definite increase in sales, sure, but how are you going to
know what had the effect and how to repeat it in the
future? You won’t.
You don’t want to just test one method one month, and
then swap to another method the next month. Look for
software that allows you to track both ads over the same
time period.
The fact is there are dry periods online. The amount and
quality of your traffic will change from month to month
depending on seasons and other program launch dates.
Tracking like this will get you far more accurate results,
as your traffic is taken from the same pool, eliminating so
many variables that could effectively give you totally
incorrect results.
Lastly and possibly the most important is to keep
everything. Make a tracking folder. Every time you test
something, record your theory prior to tracking, record
your stats, your signups, or how many visits you tested and
finally keep track of your results. This way, you can go
back and test again if you feel that times have changed, or
a particular technique has become overused.
See? It’s simple to track and test. Five or ten
minutes a day using a good tracking program and
that’s all it takes and the benefits are endless, not
to mention how good it feels when you hit the jackpot and
can apply sales and recruiting increases 10%, 20% or even
50% over multiple marketing campaigns.
----------------------------------------------------
Casey Dunham, member of
http://www.automaticbuilder.com/28203 , successfully owns
and markets several online businesses. Casey enjoys helping
other entrepreneurs achieve the financial and time freedom
that comes with owning a successful online business.
If you would like to use a free version of the same
software that Casey uses to easily track and analyze his
marketing campaigns, try the ProTrackerPlus software at:
http://www.ProTrackerPlus.net
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