Marketing Confidential

Tracking what people do lets you know what does and doesn’t work.

• Would you use a pay per click ad if the people who click on it never buy your
product?
• Would you keep paying money for a banner ad if you knew no one clicked on it?
• Would you continue to run the same classified ad if you found out no one did
what it asked them to do?
• Would you keep offering a free mini course if no one signs up for it?
The answer is NO. A loud, definite, resounding NO! But the only way to know what
results you get from taking different actions is to track what people do when you take
those actions. If you don’t know what people are doing, you have no way of knowing
what works and more importantly, what makes you money.

Testing what you do lets you improve what you do so you get better
results.
• If you could target your classified ad so people who click on it are truly interested
in your product, wouldn’t you make more sales when you run it?
• If you could create a banner ad compelling enough to get 15 out of every 1,000
people who see it to click on it instead of one out of every 1,000 people, wouldn’t
you create it?
• If you could change the wording in your pay per click ad so twice as many highly
interested people clicked on it, wouldn’t you change it?
• If you could get people to sign up for your mini-course by changing its title or
offering something different, wouldn’t you do it?
Of course you would. You’d be crazy not to.
It’s as simple as that – you track what people do so you know what is working and you
test your results so you can improve them.

This is important…

Some of your prospects are “Readers” people who will read the entire sales letter straight through from top to bottom and most sales copy is written to cater for that audience.

In some markets, a high proportion of your audience will be “Skimmers” and many copywriting experts completely forget about the “Skimmers” - people who quickly skim over your copy maybe just glancing at each section’s sub-head. Sometimes the Skimmers will immediately go to the end and read the PS, and then go back and breeze through your sales letter.

You MUST write for both the Readers and the Skimmers. If you don’t, you will your response will probably be half of what it could be .

Basically, you use a little counter. The counter is associated with each and every action a person can take. Every time a specific action is taken, the counter ads one more tick to the count.

For example, when you pay someone to run a banner ad for you, they will usually tell
you how many people see your ad and how many people click on it. Using the example
above, you might be told that one out of every 1,000 people who saw your ad actually
clicked on it. This in itself is important information because now you know how many
people must see your ad before someone will click on it.
But that’s not enough…you also want to know what the people do after they click on
your banner ad. So, you basically put a little cookie or tracking device on each visitor.
Once they click on your banner ad and go to your site, you are then able to monitor their
movements around your site. You can see if they click on any additional links. You can
see which links specifically they click on. You can see if they’ve asked to receive your
free mini-course and you can see if they buy your product.
Basically, you can track every move they make on your site – you know where they came
from, how they got there and what they do once they arrive.
Imagine how much more effective your site can be if you know which advertising
sources drive the best traffic to your site and which links on your site get the best
response.
An Important Tip: Set up your tracking so you are able to separate your traffic by the
source it came from. This is particularly important when you pay money to send traffic
to your site. If you track all visitors as one group, you may be able to tell where your
traffic came from but you won’t know what the traffic from each source did when it
arrived at your site.
For example, if you run a classified ad and a pay per click ad at the same time, you want
to know how much traffic each source – the classified ad and the pay per click ad – send
to your site, but you also want to know what the traffic from the classified ad does when
it arrives and what the traffic from the pay per click ad does when it arrives. It may be that the classified ad drives people who buy your product but the pay per click ad seems
to send people who look and leave.

Whenever you do something, do two versions of it.

If you want to run a banner ad, try running two different ads. Track how many people click on each ad AND what they do once they get to your site. Decide which version of the banner ad gets the most people to take the action you want them to take. Once you’ve identified the more effective ad, get rid of the first one and add another to test against the winning ad. Keep repeating the process until you can’t think of anything else to test.
As your banner ad becomes more tightly written and effective, the number of people
clicking on the ad and taking the action you want them to take will increase.
What about your classified ad? You want to know how many people have seen it and
how many people clicked on the link you provided. The entity running the classified ad
should be able to tell you how many people have viewed it and the tracking code you
place in the link in the ad will tell you what people do once they arrive on your site.
Just like the banner ad, you can test two ezine ads against each other to see which one
gets better results. When you find a clear winner, take it and test it against another
version of the ad.

Using pay per click advertising, you pay for each person who clicks on your ad and goes
to your site. Since you pay for every click, you want to be sure those people who do
click on your ad are interested in what you have to offer. And, you want to be sure you
have the best ad possible so you get the attention of the right people.
With pay per click ads, you track the ad itself – it’s usually very easy to see how many
times an ad has been seen and how many people have clicked on it. This tracking usually
occurs automatically with the pay per click search engine (i.e. Google, Oveture, etc.)
Then once the visitor arrives at your site, you track their actions through your own
tracking software.
Testing with pay per click ads is vital – you should always have at least two ads running
at the same time. Test them against each other – choose the one that is working the best
and then test something else against it.
In the pay per click ad examples on the next page, notice the headlines are different but
everything else in the ads is the same. Notice also the difference in the number of clicks:
45 vs. 14, and the difference in the click through rate (CTR): 0.9% vs. 0.3%. The first ad
has received more than 40 actions (45 clicks) so enough data has been collected to
declare the first ad the winner and to stop using the second ad. All other things being the
same, viewers obviously preferred “Your Pregnancy Tips” as a headline over “Get the
Inside Scoop”.
Without testing, I might have used “Get The Inside Scoop” and made the wrong
assumption that it was the best headline I could find. The end result would have been
two-thirds less click throughs meaning two-thirds less visitors to the site.

Sales copy should be like a ladies skirt – short enough to be interesting yet long enough to cover the essentials.  Each method offers its own unique advantage to the website owner. Ultimately, the decision on whether to use long or short copy as a marketing tool will depend on your product or service.  Your research may determine that long copy satisfies a particular segment of your business, while other divisions will benefit more from brevity.
Long and interesting, keyword-rich copy not only works well in natural search engines, it can offer certain advantages such as allowing your visitors to readily obtain answers to their questions while alleviating some of their anxieties about ordering your product or service. In addition, long copy, utilizing bolded or emphasized points, will give a visitor more options - allowing them the choice of just skimming the page or obtaining more detailed, specific information.
Short copy, on the other hand, provides its own distinct advantages.  It is well recognized in the Internet world that the majority of people who surf the web have a very short attention span; therefore, short, sweet and to the point sales copy often far outweighs voluminous text.  Moreover, short copy is more receptive to sleeker page presentation. With a few well-placed links, your page may have more impact, thus serving to weaken the perception that your pages are little more than hype-ridden sales letters.
Because there are no universal conventions regarding the ideal length of a promotional message, testing must be a vital component of your marketing strategy. Testing is really the only way to know for sue what works in your specific niche market. Prior to analyzing the pros and cons of long vs. short, it is essential that your best possible copy is created and tested before it is set in motion.
When testing site copy you must take into consideration variables such as page design, color, layout, and graphics, etc. Each of these components can and do influence the performance of a page. Therefore, when testing copy, it is essential that all the other page elements remain the same.

A tried and true method of tracking the success of your page is to utilize an A-B or Multivariate Test, which can ascertain that factors such as time and traffic source do not distort the results.

By determining the important elements of your landing page and discovering which images work best, what headline gets optimal response, what positioning of elements fetches increased sales, and which guarantee, return policy, or security assertion offers the most to buyers, you stand a better chance that visitors will click the “Buy Now” button on your site.

You know, sometimes you hear someone tell you that this trick or that secret works. And, to a large extent, they’re probably right. But, if you are willing to dig a little deeper you will very often discover that they are simply blindly following other people’s advice without understanding WHY it works!

So, whatever you hear, whatever you read, be willing to question and challenge. Be willing to ask people why you should take their advice. Be willing to ask people to explain the why and the how as well as the what!

And be prepared to test things for yourself.

Do you remember as a child, when your Mother wanted you to do something and, when you asked why, she said “Just Because”?

Did you know that according to accepted research if you include the word “Because” when you ask someone to do something they are much more likely to comply with your request?

Do you know why using the word because is effective?

Just because it is.. see, your Mother already knew about the power of because!

Look for opportunities for integrating “because” into your sales copy and you’ll hopefully see an increase in your sales conversion rate.

As the great copywriter Gary Halbert reminded me in one of his whacky newsletters…

You can build a great restaurant, you could spend time and money on many things such as promotions, advertising, great decor, the best chef, a cool jazz band, and the like.

But there is one single thing beyond anything else that you need to ensure your success:

Hungry customers!

Whatever your product or service make sure that you have established that there is a demand and that people are willing to pay.

Your sales conversion rate will never get above zero without customers!