Everyone these days talks so much about advertising, PPC, SEO, pop this and blog that. I guess everyone is just realizing that you can pay to send people to your site... woo hoo! Big deal - you've always been able to do this, it's just becoming available to the masses now.
The real question, as far as I'm concerned, is how many of those people buy something! Or, in some cases, how many perform the desired action (filling out a form to become a lead, for instance.) You can send a lot of traffic to your site, but the only way to know whether it's effective traffic is to measure, measure, tweak, and measure.
On nearly all of my e-commerce sites that sell an item with a sales copy letter, I measure the following items.
1. Number of people that landed on the sales page, and where they came from
2. Number (and %) of people that actually scrolled down to near the bottom of the sales page
3. Number (and %) of people that clicked through to the checkout page
4. Number (and %) of people that purchase
From these numbers I can tweak my sales letter constantly and monitor the resulting customer actions. If the % goes up, the change becomes permanent, if it goes down, it's rolled back. This allows me to send a small amount of traffic to the site and tweak the copy until I know that my larger (more $$, more risk) advertising campaign will not be wasted.
Sales copy doesn't come naturally to me the way it does to some people, but my ability to be patient and measure the success of each mod ensures my eventual success.
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>> There are only 10 kinds of people in the world - those that know binary and those that don't.
Labels: entrepreneur, online marketing