|
Articles Index >> Marketing
Why Tracking Plus Testing Equals Success
by Michael Cheney
The difference between failure and success on the Internet is that people who
track and test are successful, while people who don’t track and test are
failures.
The Internet is a unique piece of technology as it enables you to track and
test just about everything you can imagine on a website. For example, you can
track the number of visitor sessions coming to your website over a given time
period. You can get statistical analysis software that you can use in combination
with your log files from your website that will show you how many sessions you’ve
had on each day.
You can also track the number of page views that you’ve had. Software
will show you on each day how many views of certain pages have taken place.
This gives you an indication of which pages on your site are more popular than
others. And you can get access to this information either through your hosting
company or by accessing your log file and running it through a software package.
You can also get access to the particular files that people have viewed. So
if you have files that people can download, you can track which of these files
are being downloaded most often.
You can also track exactly where people are coming from in order to find your
website. You can track which links they have clicked on from other sites. Have
they visited you from a search engine? Is it from another directory or is it
another link?
If they have visited you through a search engine, using statistics you are
able to see exactly which phrase they’ve typed in to find you. This means
you can break down your audience on your website to determine exactly what their
interests are and what the majority of visitors would like to find content about.
Some sites also enable you to run software directly on your site and it actually
gives you a percentage breakdown of each navigational link. So it will show
you your navigation set and underneath it will show you a percentage saying
how many people have clicked on that link when viewing this page.
Using software like this you can plot an exact path of people through your
website. Which means you can then tailor it exactly so that it drives people
to the goal pages you would like them to land on.
Things you can test on the Internet are endless. One of the most popular ones
is testing a headline. You can have a headline on your homepage that draws people
in. You could run it for a month and see how many sales you make. Then in the
second month you could change that headline and see what effect it has. You
can then run the new, winning headline for a further month and produce a second
test headline and so on. This produces a continual improvement so that you’re
constantly tracking and testing.
Remember, tracking and testing doesn’t need to be painful, but it will
bring you success. One of the best tools I’ve come across is called ClickTracks.
You can get a free demo of it right
here and it gives you everything you would want to know about traffic
to your website.
Back to top | 
