Why Tracking is the Key to Success – IM Basics

Whether you are using free traffic or paid traffic to your site or offer, tracking your results is the key to success.

I am often asked ‘what is the one thing you need for a successful campaign?’ Is it an attention-grabbing headline, inviting sales copy, a converting sales funnel?

All of those things are important but the first aspect I set up in any campaign is the results tracking.

In the examples below, I am going to use a squeeze page offering a freebie to build a mailing list. However, you could just as easily apply these principles to a sales page.

What Do I Mean by Results Tracking?

In its simplest form, it is tracking the cost of producing an action. That could be a sale or adding a subscriber to your mailing list.

For example, say you bought a 100 click solo ad for $30 and out of those 100 hundred clicks, you gained 30 subscribers.

You now know that each subscriber cost you $1. You also know that your squeeze page converts at 30%.

How Does That Help You in the Future?

Now you know your conversion rates, you can predict how much success you would have from further solo ads and the relative cost.

So if you were to now buy a 500 click solo ad for $120, you can expect to get 150 subscribers at a cost of $0.80 per subscriber.

Real Life Example

Look at the table below :

I have tracked some results for solo ad campaigns to one of my squeeze pages. It has a One Time Offer (OTO) on the thank you page which costs between $5 and $9 based on what I am testing.

You can see that in November, my squeeze page only converted at 23.44% but I sold 15 OTO’s.  In December, I increased my conversion rate but sold hardly any OTO’s.

So I know that for next month, I need to work on my OTO conversion rate.

Predicting the Future

You can see I have 2 lines called ‘Prediction.’ These take the averages of the historical figures.

I can then put in the cost of solo ads I have found and come up with a prediction of the results based on what happened in the past.

In this case, if I bought the 1,000 click package for $220, I could reasonably expect each subscriber to cost me $0.42. In fact, if I improve my OTO conversion as I know I must, then the cost would be less.

What About Free Traffic?

The main cost of free traffic is time. Usually paid traffic is very quick to arrive where as free traffic involves a time-consuming process.  This is just as important to track.

You always want to keep results of conversion rates of squeeze pages or sales pages anyway but the most important aspect of free traffic is where the traffic is coming from.

For example, you might get traffic from your signature in a forum. However, if that traffic isn’t converting by subscribing to your list or buying your product, do you want to keep promoting that page in your signature?

Of course not.

So you would try a different signature, track the results and review them later.

Summary

I hope you are now realising how important tracking is to your internet marketing success. It should be part of every campaign you set up.

Don’t guess! Keep real figures that you can refer to before you set up your next campaign.

The real beauty of having detailed data about your conversion rates and costs is that it makes it obvious which part of your process you need to improve.