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Testing & Tracking | Article #297 : TESTING AND TRACKING – PART 4

In our last installment of testing and tracking, we completed our top 20 list of items on our sales page that need to be tested and tracked. In this installment, we’re going to try to make sense of all this and hopefully come up with a simple game plan for doing the various tests that we need to do. As complicated as all this is, simple is a rather relative term.

As I said in an earlier article, you can only test one thing or one change at a time if you’re going to be able to do this successfully. If you make too many changes, you won’t know what change produced what result. That makes your testing pretty worthless as you won’t know what to keep and what to discard. So if we agree on nothing else in all of this, let’s agree that we can only change on variable at a time.

Does this make the process long and tedious? Yes, it does. The patience required to making just one little, or not so little change at a time is beyond what most people are capable of. That’s what separates the successful marketers from the not so successful marketers. So it is my hope that after reading this entire series that you’ll develop the patience and the discipline to test and track your campaigns efficiently and correctly.

Okay, so where do we begin? Well, we’re going to make some assumptions here. Our first assumption is that we have already completed our website and have put it out there for the world to see.

Our second assumption is that we have started to promote the site through a variety of channels including article marketing, solo ads, forum participation and so on.

And then, our final assumption is that we have put the site out there long enough to get a decent amount of traffic and sales for that traffic. You want to keep a close eye on your conversion percentage because that’s the whole ball game. So let’s assume that we’ve run our initial campaign for a week and got 5000 visitors to our site with 150 sales for a 3% conversion rate. That’s not too bad, but maybe we can improve on it.
After we have put our site out there and gotten our initial statistics, we next have to decide what we are going to test first. This is where there is no right or wrong answer. Changing a part of your web site doesn’t have to be done in any particular order.  You can start with changing the headline to see if it gets more people to maybe sign up for your newsletter or increase sales. Maybe you think that your income proof isn’t convincing enough. Maybe you didn’t include it at all and might want to do that next.

Then changes that you make are going to come from your gut. Nobody is going to be watching over your shoulder telling you what to do. You’re on your own here. Now, you can ask for feedback from people who have visited your site and have opted into your list. What’s that you say? You didn’t include an opt-in form? Well, that may be one of the things you’ll want to test to see if there is any improvement in conversions.

In our next installment, we’re going to do some fictional changes to our fictional site and see what kind of results we get. The results themselves don’t matter as much as what we do with the information we get from those results.

See you then.

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