Topic: The Importance of Tracking and Split Testing All Advertising
Many people spent a lot of time developing webpages and advertising all over the web but have no clue where the traffic is coming from and they're not leveraging their time to get the most results. If you spend tons of effort writing a blog or advertising in social media such as twitter and facebook, classified ads, traffic exchanges, forum marketing, writing articles, and a whole slew of other venues, don't you at least want to know where the traffic is coming from?
Tracking Leverages Your Time and Efforts
Tracking means having a way to trace back on where your traffic is coming from so you know where to spend your time and efforts to scale up your advertising efforts to maximize your results. We should all be familiar with tracking cookies and that is how APS tracks your forum and webinar links available in your office. Those cookies last 7 days. Here is more information on the cookies and forum and webinar links.
Duration of forum/webinar referral cookie
How to use forum/webinar referral cookie
Ramesh touched tracking briefly here but that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are different levels of tracking and it requires a tracking id. You can get a tracking id for your referral pages by going to the Referral page in your back office, roll to bottom of screen, and click on "View Referring URLs and Create Tracking IDs", then it will take you to a page which shows the tracking id for the 3 steps.
Unless you already have a tracking id created, then you will only see [None] which means there is no tracking involved and you won't know where the traffic is coming from with the exception that you had only advertised at one venue. You can also create link shorteners to prevent other people from removing your affiliate id. There are external tracking link shorteners which will also provide you with click tracking information---so how many people actually clicked on your link? Here are a few free ones:
Tracking with budurl
Tracking with itshrunk
Tracking with prosperityrising
The more information that you have about your referrals or traffic source the better you'll be able to scale your campaigns and advertising efforts. This should be a minimal requirement before you even start to advertise. Otherwise, you could be wasting your time regardless of how well you've written an article or the time you spent developing different posts and pages in your blog. There should be tracking differentiation in every link that you sent traffic. Here's a question: how effective is your forum signature below? If you have a tracking id for every link, then you might realize that a lot of your traffic is from this forum so you should spent more time writing better posts instead of advertising all over the place 
If you do this, the benefit is a lot of preselling has already been done for you before your referral even got here. Let them come to you instead of you going to them.
Split Testing Is Essential To Your Success
Split Testing means that you incrementally make changes to your campaigns, ads or webpages to determine what is pulling in traffic and increasing conversion rates or sales thus increasing your effectiveness. If you advertise with Google Adwords, MSN or Yahoo, then you might want to create different campaigns and adgroups with different headline words or descriptions to see which works best. You should also add your conversion IDs in your back office under "Add/Edit IDS=>Enter Your Conversion IDs." If you have a blog with an opt-in box, then you can consider moving and testing the location of the opt-in box at different locations such as left and right sidebars, main body, or a dropdown box. You can also test out different landing pages in your blog or what is above the fold. If you have a webpage, consider testing different fonts and colors of your title and headlines, and video against text. For every testable element in the page, you can consider testing it.
A while back, we had a page design contest. Scott submitted 3 different designs which are good examples of split testing. Which one do you think is best?
We don't know for sure unless we test them out with a different tracking id such as design1, design2, and design3 for step 1 completion. What about Mike's design here? Could we not swap the video position with Tissa's picture box. What about changing the headlines, picture frame colors or adding an opt-in box? We don't know unless we split test and track them.
As you can see, tracking and split testing are very important for your success. Let's look at some numbers. Lets say Mike O.'s page only got 2 sign ups after 100 clicks with no change. If Mike were to move the sign up boxes to the right hand side, swapping the position of latest events with where the video is, and have Tissa's picture below the latest news and events, would that be better? Maybe. Split testing and tracking would definitely give us those answers thus increasing our effectiveness and conversion rates.
As you can see, unless you do tracking and split testing in everything that you do, then you could be wasting time, money and wander all over the place.
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Milton
Last edited by Milton Cai (2010-01-01 19:20:10)
