Marketing your business is a heady task. Once you get your next marketing campaign up and running, how do you know if it’s working? The answer…testing and tracking your efforts.
Testing and tracking is a task I know I need to do… but have not spent much time learning how to do. I know that I’m going to need the right testing and tracking tools to get started. I’ve got great websites and products that sell… but how can I learn to sell more or how can I learn if my visitors are finding what they need?
I’m going on a bit of a journey here and I hope you will follow along… leaning as I do.
Here’s some options for testing that I have:
Split Testing. When you use split testing you isolate one particular aspect and test it. This is also called A/B testing.
For example, you could test the color of your headline on your landing page. In this case you could have one landing page with a red headline and one landing page with a black headline.
Via your normal traffic driving techniques like PPC or a direct response email campaign, you send some visitors to your standard web page and you send some visitors to your test page.
photo credit: TheTruthAbout…
Multivariable testing is another option to test the effectiveness of a particular marketing tool and to optimize it for maximum effect. It is, however, a bit more complicated. The idea would be to test a combination of changes. For example you could change both the color of the headline along with the call to action and perhaps your call out boxes on your landing page.
You’d create several different landing pages, each with a few changes and then track the results.
Multivariable testing is capable of testing several aspects of a web page it can take a long time to gather enough data to make accurate decisions, particularly if a website has low to medium traffic, which makes Split testing an easier and more effective tool for many public domain businesses.
There are a number of factors to test to make sure you’re getting the best results possible with your chosen marketing tool.
- o Headline
- o Offer
- o Price
- o Call to action
- o Promise
- o Color
- o Font
- o Key words
- o Advertisements
- o Email delivery times
- o Email subject lines
- o Email from lines
- o Forms
- o Pop ups
Tracking
Tracking is the second step of testing however you can also use tracking data outside of any testing system. Tracking is simply using the data available to find out how your customers and prospects are responding to you, your business, and your marketing materials.
For example, you can track how many people visit your landing page, where they go on your website, how long they stay there, and how many abandoned shopping carts you have in relation to total purchases. Tracking data shows you exactly where your efforts are working and where they’re not.
Let’s just say that, if you offer a number of children’s story collections and you find that one particular product is left in the shopping cart again and again, you know that this particular product’s marketing needs some work or perhaps the product needs revision.
Online you can track:
- o Click throughs
- o Visits
- o Views per page
- o Opt ins/subscriptions
- o Shopping cart abandonment
- o Conversions
- o Keywords
Many website hosts offer basic statistics and tracking data however you may also want to consider Google analytics and/or *(see below) CRM software to track and manage your customer database which can be a valuable source of information. Once you know what’s going on deep within your business, you can make better business decisions for sustainable success.
* Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term applied to processes implemented by a company to handle its contact with its customers. CRM software is used to support these processes, storing information on current and prospective customers. (from Wikipedia)
Next up… I’m going to choose what tools I need to use for testing and tracking – before I decide what I’m going to test. I’ll keep you posted on my efforts.
Have you read about Opt-In Lists?
About The Author:
 Debra Conrad is an online entrepreneur, information publisher, and author that has been using Public Domain material to create profitable products and businesses since 2007. She is also co-author of "The Public Domain Treasure Hunter's Survival Kit" available here. For more info Debra, click here. |
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