One of the most common mistakes that rookie marketers make is to not bother with tracking conversions.
The reasons for this are varied, but usually it is because of laziness or just not realising the importance of it. Without tracking your marketing you really have no idea of working out which campaigns are profitable or not.
Statistics tell you a story about how well the market place is responding to your marketing. Some people are put off by analysing numbers, but just like any business the numbers are necessary to measure the performance of the business.
In my opinion the five most important things to measure when tracking conversions are:
1. Opt in rate
The opt in rate is worked out by the number of visits divided by the number of opt ins.
A good opt in rate is generally about 20%, and anything close to or over 30% is usually regarded as excellent.
You should aim for an opt in rate of at least 10%, which basically means that one in every 10 visits results in an opt in. The idea is to split test your landing pages until you find the combination that works. If your opt in rate is less than 10% then you need to study top earners landing pages to see how they do it.
2. Conversion rate
The conversion rate is worked out by the number of leads divided by the number of sales.
if you are selling very expensive products then you would expect your conversion rate to be very low, but it really depends on how good your sales letter is.
A professionally written sales letter will greatly increase your conversion rate and is worth investing in. Don’t try to save money here by doing it yourself, unless you are very good at copy writing.
3. Average cost per click
The average cost per click is worked out by the cost of the campaign divided by the number of clicks.
Most people are familiar with this one, but it is worth mentioning.
4. Average cost per lead
The average cost per lead is worked by the cost of the campaign divided by the amount of leads that it has produced.
This amount is basically how much you are paying for each subscriber that is added to your list. If you can get this amount down to about $2 or $3 then it greatly increases your chances of being profitable.
If you are paying $10 or more per lead then you don’t stand much chance of making a profit, particularly if you are not selling expensive products.
5. Return on investment
The ROI is obviously the difference between the total sales and total expenses, and is the reason why we are in business.
So now that you know what you should be measuring, we will now look at how you can start tracking conversions in your business.
You could use a free service such as bit.ly to keep an eye on your click statistics, but that will not measure your conversions. The tool that I use for all of my tracking is called Hypertracker.
Hypertracker will allow you to accurately pinpoint your most productive ads, visitors or products — quickly and automatically and all in the one place. The advantage of a tracking system such as Hypertracker is that everything is all integrated and easy to find.
For each different campaign that you are running you just run through the simple set up steps and it generates a new URL for you to use on that campaign. Once you have set it up you can come back at any time and quickly gauge the performance of each campaign.
The point is that no one is born with the skills to become a marketing guru, and that the only way to get really good at it is to just keep testing everything. And just like anything in life, practice makes perfect.
The more campaigns that you test, the better you are going to be at judging what triggers people to take action. But if your not bothering with tracking conversions, then you are basically marketing blind and wasting your money in the process
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