Testing and Tracking Your Online Operation - Is it Really Necessary?

Testing and tracking all you do online makes a lot of sense. Think about your email headlines, email closings, your squeeze page headlines, email open rates and so on. You really need to be able to test your operation.

Some of the few ways to do this will depend to some extent on your choice of testing tools.
Good auto responders like Aweber offers tracking and have the ability to rotate your opt in web form to enable you track the opt-in rate. For example, one opt-in form might offer a free ebook, while the other offers a free 7 part auto responder ecourse. You want to find out which of the two offers gives the highest sign-up percentage.

You might also want to test two different opt in page headlines against each other. Again, you would want to spend time doing this to know which one gets the highest sign-up percentage. It will eliminate guesswork and ensure you place your efforts where it will be most productive.

You should aim to test as much as you possibly can. Suffice to say that if you make three changes, and the response rate at your lead capture page goes up, that is not very useful information if you don't know which particular element is responsible for the actual change.

Another way to test the effectiveness of your operations is by creating several different name lead capture pages, each with just one change on it. You then subscribe to a web URL rotator service, and each of the different test pages will be viewed in succession by each successive visitor.

Now when you run your advertising (or whatever traffic generation method you are using) you will put in the rotator link rather than the lead capture page link. Each time a visitor clicks on the rotator link, the rotator will rotate to the next elad capture page. You can then compare sign-up rates between the different lead capture pages.

Whichever method you use the principle is clear: test what you do to find out if it is effective or not. If it is not then you need to find out why and if it is see if you can improve it. Do not waste time and effort on things that do not work.