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Create A Testing & Tracking System
In the words of Ken Evoy, "The only way to successfully market anything is to TRACK and MEASURE your results. In fact, the ability to do this effectively is one of the most powerful benefits of doing business on the internet. So, if you want to be successful, track, track and then track some more..." From an advertising standpoint, testing and tracking each and every ad and promotion is really the only way to know which of your marketing strategies are paying off - and which are a waste of time. When it comes to promoting your business efficiently, there is no such thing as too much testing. And it's so quick and easy to do on the Internet, there is no excuse for not doing it - unless, of course, you like wasting money! Or as Dr. Ralph Wilson so eloquently puts it:
"Of course, you can't just throw money at advertising. We've had plenty of
examples of how that can backfire. Instead, test, test, test to find
cost-effective forms of advertising, and then develop a deliberate program of
advertising month in and month out.
Test, Refine, Test, Refine & Test Again! Most first time marketers tend to focus exclusively on generating traffic to their Website, but the fact is, generating traffic without a proven marketing system is pretty much a waste of time. What matters is not so much how many prospects you can attract to your site, but your profit per prospect you attract. If you get a hundred visitors to your site, but no one buys anything, you do not have a successful marketing strategy or system. And until you can develop one, based on proven results, you will not be truly successful in conducting business online. Making more sales and improving the profitability of your sales process means testing many different variations of it against one another - to see what works and what doesn't. It's not always easy, but when you find out what works and are able to repeat it consistently, you are one step closer to putting your business on auto-pilot. Invaluable market research can be obtained by simply testing different criteria like subject lines, headlines, offers, and prices, and incorporating what you learn into future promotions. If you market with e-mail, every subject line you run must be tested against other subject lines so you can see which ones generate the greatest number of hits (and the most amount of money). One way of doing this is to drive traffic to multiple identical web pages, each with it's own hidden counter or coding system. A far simpler way of doing this is to use a tip from tracking expert extaordinaire, ROIbot's Mark Joyner. Whenever you add a ? to the end of a .htm or .html page, it has absolutely no effect on the page that gets called up. So, if you were to write: http://www.websuccessmaker.com/freereport.html or http://www.websuccessmaker.com/freereport.html?campaign1 the exact same page would be called up, but your server logs would treat them as two different pages. This is a great way to keep track of how successful your e-mail, ezine, classified and banner ad campaigns are. Just give each campaign a different ? code. (You have to append the ? after the name of an HTML file. It won't always work if you do it at the end of a domain name/URL.) Every online sales letter, whether delivered via the Web or with an autoresponder, must have a tracking code so you can determine which marketing pieces are profitable and what percentage of prospects turn into customers. If you are taking orders on your website, separate online order forms must be set up for separate campaigns, so you can see which ones generate money. Bottom Line? Every time you try out a new marketing strategy you need to test its results. Test every keyword, ad, list submission service, advertising tactic and promotion tool you use. Keep what works and dump what doesn't. Then test again. When you find a strategy that gives you good results, don't just stick with it, write it down for future reference. Eventually, you'll wind up with a handy list of proven effective promotion techniques and services that you can use over and over again. Keeping accurate track of what works and what doesn't is just about the most important thing you can do to assure the success, as well as the cost- effectiveness, of your marketing efforts. Once you have developed a proven system for squeezing maximum profit from every prospect you attract to your Website, your job as an internet marketer becomes relatively easy: generate targeted leads and funnel them into your profit-making system.
Testing & Tracking Words of Wisdom => Break your advertising expenditures into "campaigns." That way you can easily assign both costs and income to a specific project. => Remember, there's no such thing as an unsuccessful test. You will always learn something when you run a promotion and track your results. Even if your initial sales pitch hits a brick wall, at the very least you will discover what the problems were and learn what not do do again. => Test only one element at a time. If you change your headline and your price in the same test, there's no way to know what affected the response. You may have guessed right with one element, and not another. Testing both teaches you nothing at all. => Don't waste your tests. If you're using opt-in e-mail, you may have only a few hundred names at first. Don't test ambiguous elements or things that make little difference. There are four major elements that affect response, and they should be tested first and foremost, regardless of how you promote your site:
=> Make sure everything works before you attempt to track results from a test. If your Web page is down or you put the incorrect link in an ad you are running, it doesn't matter whether or not you have a hidden counter on the page. It's a virtual certainty you won't get any hits at all. Go through each element of your campaign as a customer would before you roll it out.
There's Always Room For Improvement After you have tested a few headlines, offers and other attributes, you'll end up with a sales letter or Web page that is has a predictably profitable outcome. This becomes your control piece. In other words, you have a reasonable expectation that when a certain number of people see this message or visit this page, a fixed percentage will buy. You can then either rest on your laurels, if you are satisfied you are getting adequate results, or you can do what the top 10% of online marketers do, you can work to improve your sales conversion statistics by:
The best marketers on the Internet today, the ones who earn the really big bucks, are the best testers - the ones who who know their numbers and constantly strive to improve them. Remember, if you can improve on your ads or your website sales copy, if you can increase your visitor-to-sales ratio by even just a few percentage points, it will work wonders for you business's bottom line. It doesn't matter how many hits you get if your site doesn't do its job. Likewise, the best website in the world is useless if you aren't able to attract many visitors. Proper testing and tracking will help you to do both! TIP: Two terrific resources, offered up by proven masters who have spent their careers testing and tracking their marketing are: Terry Dean's Netbreakthrough's private site, where he offers up a virtual compendium of need to know, up to the minute web promotion info and stats, and Mark Joyner's Confidential Internet Intelligence Manuscript, in which he reveals the remarkable results of an amazing arsenal of marketing techniques it took him years to perfect.
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