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Day 22 – Testing and Tracking
By Mike Mindel | August 23, 2007
This content is summarised from Day 22 – On Testing and Tracking, presented by Dan Raine.
The Most Important Thing You Can Do
Apart from good quality market research, tracking is the single most important thing you should do as an internet marketer.
If you’ve been around internet marketing for a while, and you’ve been on the Warrior Forum for a while, you hear everyone talk about tracking and testing this headline, tracking that copy. But when you get one and one with most people and they say to you ‘have you any idea why this isn’t working’ and you say ‘have you tested this?’ you get the answer ‘well, no we’re planning to do this’. You say ‘have you tracked that?’ and the answer comes back ‘no, it’s on the list of things to do.’
Everybody seems to do that! Everyone talks about tracking and nobody actually does it. If there’s one single thing that will make the difference between you making pocket money in internet marketing and you earning an income in internet marketing it’s good quality tracking.
Tracking fulfillls two purposes. Firstly, it show you how well you’re doing, and secondly it’s an early warning system.
Testing Shows You How Well You’re Doing
Let me give you an example. About 8 weeks ago I set up a page very similar to what you’re creating now for the Thirty Day Challenge. A single content page with an affiliate link to an affiliate product.
When I looked for the affiliate product I went to ClickBank. There were actually four competing products in ClickBank for that market and I actually picked the one with the highestest earnings ratio of $16.34 a sale.
When I put the site live I got 40 / 50 visitors a day and after a couple of weeks we went from position #7 in Google to position #2. Now were getting 160 visitors per day coming through to our content page.
For that 160 people, about 60% of people click through to the affiliate product., It’s good. Nice and slippery. This results in a sale every 2 days. Now a sale every 2 days at $16.34 means $8.17 per day. That’s $2,985 a year. Not bad. $3,000 a year is nothing to sneeze about for one page of content that took me 45 minutes to write. But if it wasn’t for testing and tracking I would actually have lost $2,500 a year.
Let me explain that.
We were running this for a couple of weeks after we got to #2 in Google. But I went back to ClickBank and looked at the other products. I went through every salespage and you know what, the third product had a fantastic sales page. It was written well. I thought this is going to really well so I’ll try it.
The only trouble is the product was $9.80 per commission. Now $9.80 vs $16.34 isn’t so great. But I thought I’d give it a go and see what kind of result I get with it.
We flipped over the affiliate product and low and behold we made more money. With this new product we made an average of 1.6 sales per day. Thats $15.68 per day. Or $5,723 a year. Fantastic. That’s over 100% more than the $2,700 we made with the previous affiliate product. If we hadn’t tracked that we would have left so much money on the table.
That’s why tracking is so important. You just don’t know how well these things convert. The only way to do it is to test products against each other. If I hadn’t of tracked the data, changed the product and tested it, then I would have left $2,500 a year on the table – a fantastic holiday right there.
If you’re getting 40 or 50 visitors per day coming through to your content page then you’ll need to leave it a week or two until you get 1000, 1500, 2000 visitors to get an idea how well an affiliate product is doing for you.
Affiliate products sell in different ways. Some sell better at the weekends, some sell better in the week, some are seasonal. If you don’t leave it for a good sampling of time and a good sampling of the number of people then the data you are analyzing is probably not strong enough to make a decision.
If you’re going to test a product against another product then you’re looking at 1500 to 2000 visitors to make a decision about how well a product is doing. And if isn’t doing particularly well then switch to another one and test that. But make sure you have a decent enough data sample to test and track that.
What is Slipperiness?
How slippery is your content? Say you’re getting 160 visitors per day to your content. You want to measure how many people actually click out to the affiliate product.
In the whole process you’re going to measure how many people come into the content page using Google Analytics or Statcounter or any other of the number of free services.
After that you’ll measure the number of people who click out of your content page to your affiliate product. We call that the slipperiness. The more people who click out the more slippery the content.
Then finally you’re going to measure the number of people who buy the product.
The first way is to use Google Analytics or Statcounter to measure the number of people coming into the page. The second process, using our own tracking system, will allow you to measure the number of people who click out of that link to the affiliate product. Then use the affiliate’s tracking service to tell you how many people have actually made a sale.
This is the single most important thing you guys should be doing. It sounds really simple and obvious. But unless you test and track these numbers you’re not going to know what’s going on.
I personally, one a week, go over my stats and put all the numbers I have in to a Google Spreadsheet. For each market I’m in I track all this data very week. I track the affiliate product I’m selling. If I think I can make a change or test another product then I’ll test that out and see if I get a better result for that week. If I do, then I’ll stick with it.
Over a period of 6-7 months I’ll split test with a couple of other products. If I see another product on the market I’ll give it a go. If it’s getting better sales and earning you more per visitor then why aren’t you doing this?
Using Tracking as an Early Warning System
Say you’re in Google and you’re in position #5 for ‘how to change diapers’ and you’re getting 60/70 visitors a day and earning $4/day on average in sales.
All of a sudden if you notice that the visitors coming thorugh has dropped, the clicks through has dropped and the income has droped then you need to know why.
Two things could have happened
The Affiliate Product Might Have Changed
They might have changed the sales page and it’s not working anymore. You might need to flip to another affiliate product.
Your Google Ranking May Have Dropped
More likely your ranking has dropped in Google ranking. But why? Chances are someone else has come along and entered in your market. They’ve got their own page up their now.
By noticing those sudden drops without checking your rankings everyday in Google you save a lot of time. Once you’ve got 30 or 40 pages then going through Google and checking rankins can be time consuming and a real pain. Just look at your stats everyday and if you notice that there’s a drop of visitors coming through to your content page then you know there’s some kind of problem. Then go back to Google and check your position. Chances are you’ve been knocked off your spot by somebody else.
What Do You Need to Do Then?
You need to give you content page some more loving.
As we get further on in this challenge we’ll talk about giving the page some more loving. With tracking and testing you can see these things as an early warning sign. As soon as you see the numbers dip then ask yourself why are they dipping? Is it a trend like more sales on the weekend then thats’ fine. But on Thursday if you normally have 45 visitors and you’re getting 6 then you know you’ve been knocked off your spot.
An early warning sign gives you a chance to come back, recover, fight back and get your position back from your competitor. It’s a game we all play and your competitor will do the same thing. But if I know the internet marketing world like I think I do then your competitor will knock you off your spot once. He’ll get number 5 and knock you down to 6 or 7. Then he’ll probably walk away and leave it and never come back to it again.
That’s what most people do in the internet marketing game. They go ‘this is great I’ve got to this position. I’m earning $8 / $9 a day on this’ and that’s it. They move on to the next thing. They’ll probably never come back to that page again. You guys can be clever marketers here and you can beat most other internet marketers in the long run by testing and tracking.
Please don’t say you’re going to do it and not do it. Actually take action and do it. If you do that now you are one step ahead of most other internet marketers.
Thirty Day Challenge Stats Tracker
I’m now going to show you how to use our Thirty Day Challenge Stats Tracker to measure the slipperiness of your content page.
You need to know how many people are clicking on the link that goes through to your affiliate program. You can change your content if it’s not slippery enough. If you’re only getting 10-15% of people clicking through then you need to make it more enticing for your visitor to click on the link.
WordPress Blog Example
Let’s go over to my WordPress blog
Let’s create some content by clicking on ‘My Dashboard’
and write a post
(Disclaimer: This is NOT an example of good content!)
What I want to do is create a link from the word ‘grooming secrets’
Find a ClickBank Product
We’ll pop over to ClickBank now and find an affiliate program.
over to ‘Buy Products’
search for ‘grooming’
Create a ‘hoplink’ for ‘Grooming Secrets For Men’
Lets submit that…
There’s our hoplink.
Let’s copy it
The New Tracking Program
Instead of using the link above, we’ll give you a special affiliate link that tracks and counts the number of people who click on the link before sending them through to the affiliate page.
If you navigate to the Dashboard you’ll notice a new option on the right hand side called TDC Stats Tracker
If you click on that link you’ll see this page
The first thing we need to do is click on the New URL button
It pops up a box and asks you to add a new URL to track
Lets give it a name. It’s handy to name these after your keyword or your niche. Add a description and pop in your ClickBank link into the Destination URL
Make sure you remove the http:// link
Now click ‘Add URL’
and there’s your new URL
What you have now is a new address
This is your unique address which is just for you and just for your link.
So if someone goes to that URL then it will go through to our tracking system, record a hit, and then take them to the affiliate page you put in.
Some More Options
There’s the unique address
the destination URL it goes to
and count. Count is the number of times people have clicked on that link.
First things first. Test everything is working fine. So click on ‘Test URL’
You get two links to click on. One is your unique tracking URL or address (on the left). Or you can click on the ClickBank link.
So click on the unique tracking URL
We’ve proven the click goes through to the salespage via the tracking system.
Click on the refresh button
and the count is now 1
We clicked on the link and the count has been updated.
You can also press the Reset button
which will set the count back to 0.
So in summary, I will look at Statcounter to get the number of people who visited the page, record the number of people who click through to the affiliate program from the dashboard and store the information on Google Docs.
The Edit Option
See the Edit option
You can click on that if you want to change your Destination URL, Destination Name or Destination Description
Let’s change the Destination Name to ‘Grooming Tips’ and click Done
and the name is now changed to ‘Grooming Tips’
Back to Our Content
Copy the tracking url
move through to WordPress and highlight ‘grooming secrets’
Select the link button
paste in the tracking link
add a Title
and click ‘Insert’
The Grooming Secrets link has been added.
Now publish the post
and there it is!
Hyperlink Preview
On WordPress, when you hover a link they show you a hyperlink preview like this
This will affect your tracking stats. If people hold their mouse over it, that will actually count as a click. It’s only WordPress that are doing that. Squidoo, HubPages, BlogSpot don’t have this snap preview plugin. So any clicks are unique. But over the next day or so we will filter out these snap previews.
Example Sneaky Waxing Tricks site is here.
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Topics: Daily Summaries | 13 Comments »
August 23rd, 2007 at 3:07 am
So what does the 30DC tracking clicker do to you once this challenge is over? Where can we get a similar setup we can do ourselves?
Just wondering.
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:07 am
Wow… Mike, you are a machine. This material is amazing. You could just about do without the videos with this.
Props, man.
-Garrett
August 23rd, 2007 at 6:12 am
Once again incredible job Mike!
- Michael V
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:46 am
I believe the tracker will be sticking around after the 30 day challenge.
But check with Ed by posting a thread in the forum.
-Mike
August 23rd, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Yep, good stats tracking software is essential but they must be set up and configured correctly (and I’ve seen nothing free that makes the grade). Otherwise your stats will give you bum steers that are worse than no info. I’ve worked for many websites and I haven’t yet seen one finish the job of seting up their stats software right. Keep up the quality blogging.
August 25th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Hi Mike,
Since I’ve discovered your blog I’m doing the 30DC without watching most of the video’s. I like to read, it is much faster than watching a video.
So thank you!
-Van
August 25th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
[...] Day 22 – Testing and Tracking [...]
August 28th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
your stats tracker is the bomb!
thanks again Mike!
August 28th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
It’s not mine actually so I can’t take credit for it.
It belongs to the Thirty Day Challenge team. I’m doing the daily summaries and commentary.
-Mike
August 28th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Oh and GTrends of course. I did write that (with Mike Stenhouse)!
September 30th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Mike, how did you get StatCounter on your niche wordpress page? When I paste mine into a text widget, wordpress removes the script tags when I save it.
October 20th, 2007 at 6:00 am
Thank you for so detailed overview of the course!
You are great Mike!
April 6th, 2008 at 6:37 am
[...] This content is adapted for network marketers, from the Thirty Day Challenge Lesson and Mike Mindel’s notes [...]