Hey everyone, Many people know me as a bit of a test and track freak. I test and track EVERYTHING under the sun! Most people's eyes glaze over when you start talking about testing and tracking, but, it is NOT difficult at all! I'm not going to get into testing in this post, but rather just focus on the easiest part, which is tracking. Why track? Well, as a simple example. If you are paying for traffic, whether it is PPC or other means, how do you know which traffic is converting, and which not? Are you going to keep on paying for traffic which is not converting? Most people do! PPC is pretty easy, as Google provides you with all the tracking inside of AdWords. Now, whether you are actually using it, is a different story! What about OTHER traffic sources? Places like Traffic Exchanges, forums, emails, broadcasts to your list, etc, etc, etc. Let's look at an example from one of my trackers. The data below is a small sample from a live tracker. Campaigns Raw Clicks Unique Clicks Actions Sales CTA CTS Group easyhits4u 31 30 1 0 3.33% 0% WordPress Made EZ listdotcom 3 3 1 0 33.33% 0% WordPress Made EZ warriorforum 6 5 0 0 0% 0% WordPress Made EZ wpmezaw 14 13 0 1 0% 7.69% HTML Made EZ Code (markup): The 1st line is a Traffic Excahange campaign I am running. It's very clear to see how many people have opted into my list from that campaign. Yes, just 1 optin from 30 clicks does not seem a lot, but, it's a 3.33% conversion, which is good. Also, this is just for a couple of hours, to show as an example. The second line is from a email I sent on ListDotCom. The third is from my sig file in this forum. The 4th is for a different product which I mailed to the list created from the 1st 3 lines. The abbreviation wpmezaw stands for: WordPress Made EZ AW. So, I know which list in Aweber I sent from, and the group name shows me which product I mailed for. How difficult is it to do that level of tracking? Well, it depends on the software you are using. I am using AdTrackzPro in this example. Google it. ATP provides me with a link for each campaign I setup. It also provides me with a small piece of code which I put on the final page, which would be the last page a person sees from opting into my list, or, buying my product. It takes about 2 minutes extra work for every promotion I do, BUT, I know exactly which traffic is converting, and which is not. This means that any paid traffic I know at all times what is working and what not. If it's not working, I move the budget for that source to a different source. Plain and simple. Throwing testing into the mix, makes things slightly more complicated, but, not much. That is a topic for a different post though.
It's clever and essential yes, I admit being lazy enough to often discard those things and just looking at general profit, not optimizing individual campaigns! It's lazy and stupid, I need to improve in this area.