subject: Importance of Testing and Tracking Your Online Business [print this page] Importance of Testing and Tracking Your Online Business
True story... I kid you not. I was chatting with a friend of mine who was having a fair amount of success on the Internet. I asked him where his sales were coming from. His answer to me was that he didn't know. So I said to him, "You mean you don't track where your visitors are coming from? You don't know which ads are pulling and which ones is garbage? I couldn't believe that a fairly successful businessman didn't track his results.
Now, you're probably thinking, "What does it matter as long as he's successful?" Well, it does matter. And I'm going to explain to you why. See, even if you are successful, if you're not testing and tracking, you can't possibly be optimizing your promotions.
Let's take an example. Let's say you have about 5 ads running all over the Internet and each one is costing you $200 a month. That's $1,000 a month in advertising expenses. Okay, at the end of the month, you've made $3,500 on the $1,000 in ads.
But what happens if you tracked each ad to see how many sales each one was actually bringing and you found out that three of the ads weren't bringing you any sales at all? So then instead of having a profit of only $2,500 a month, your profit is now $3,100 a month. That's quite an increase... just because you tracked your ads and killed the ones that weren't performing.
You should be doing split testing on your sales pages to see if one letter performs better than another. Basically, if you're not testing and tracking, you're working in the dark.
