Quick Market Testing How-To
It would be a great mistake to put one hundred percent of your faith in one, two, or even all the marketing systems you’ve seen all over the net. You need to approach marketing as though it were an experiment, and then tweak your efforts until you find a strategy that you can put one hundred percent of your faith into.
You can’t do that until you test your efforts.
This article shows you the “what” and the “how” part of market testing so that viability becomes your reality.
What Market Testing Entails
Just as a scientist tests his/her theories, online~merchants must test their efforts. As an entrepreneur, you have to test your ideas, your tools, and your efforts in order to determine how well each works. Failing to do so results in overspending, misguided leads, and wasted time.
Testing Needs Tracking
The most effective way to test what works and what doesn’t is to track it.
Tracking in the business sense involves marking a certain strategy or product, and then following that mark to observe its performance and form conclusions about causes of both successes and failures.
Tracking With a Simple URL
Effectively track the successes or failures of your online campaigns with one of the simplest methods known online: query strings. A query string is a group of characters appended to the end of a website’s URL, and it can identify:
- who’s coming to a website
- what brought them there
As an example, let’s say you want to track how many people visit your website from your latest e-book. To find out, place links to your website that look something like this: http://www.ourwebsite.com?source=ebook in different areas of the e-book.
Notice the “?source=ebook” part after the URL? That part of the URL is a query string that shows up in traffic logs. When you look at your traffic logs and see a number ”?source=e-book” referrals, it means people not only downloaded and read your e-book, it means they visited your website as well. With this simple query string, you now have two important pieces of data: (1) who came to our website (e-book readers) and (2) where they came from (your e-book).
If the number of visits is high, you can feel confident that your e-book is popular and effective in bringing visitors (i.e. you have a viable marketing strategy).
Use this same strategy in everything that you distribute online. You can implement this strategy in distributed software, newsletters, even forum and blog posts.
External Resources:
1. The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions
2. 2,239 Tested Secrets For Direct Marketing Success
3. Organizing and Completing a Plan that Works
