Monitoring click through rates and conversions are absolutely critical to success in internet marketing.
I use Click Magick and the following is a short extract from their guide:
If you’re paying for traffic, unless you get ridiculously lucky, you have almost no chance of success if you don’t track your traffic and optimize your marketing “funnel.”
It may not sound terribly sexy on the surface, I’ll give you that …
But I’ve been marketing online for almost 8 years now, and I can tell you that tracking is truly one of the only “secrets” to making a ton of money online.
To optimize your marketing, and your entire online business, you’ll want to track all the money coming in and all the money going out – down to the penny.
It’s simple, and there are really only three parts to it.
Here’s all you need to do:
1. Track all the money you spend buying traffic.
2. Track all of the resulting sales and revenue.
3. Optimize, rinse and repeat.
One of the most important metrics you’ll need to pay attention to, starting right now and for the rest of your marketing career, is Return On Investment or ROI.
ROI is just what it sounds like. It’s the amount of money you make compared to the amount of money you spent to make it, expressed as a percentage.
So if your ROI, either overall in your business or for any specific ad or marketing campaign, is positive that means you’re making money, and if it’s negative that means you’re losing money.
To increase your ROI you need to either increase your revenues or reduce expenses.
And tracking is the key to both of these things.
How can you increase your revenues?
The easiest way is to increase your Sales Conversion Rate, which is simply the number of buyers divided by the number of visitors you get.
So if you average five new customers out of every 100 visitors, that’d be 0.05 or 5%.
A Short But Critical List
Let’s go ahead and make a list of the things you need to track …
1. All of your ads, promotions, or other sources of traffic.
2. Your “Action” and Sales Conversion Rates.
3. Your ROI for each individual source of traffic.
It all begins with the ‘click’, and you should strive to know where each and every click comes from, and how much each and every click costs you.
Whether it’s an ad on Google or Facebook or some other network, an ad you’re running on a blog in your niche, a “guest post” or other piece of content you’ve published somewhere, “solo ads” you’re buying or anything else, you need to track it.
You can do this a few different ways depending on the tracking system you’re using, but generally speaking you’ll want to use a unique tracking link for all of your different ads and traffic sources.
It takes just a second to create a new tracking link for each new ad or promotion, or you can use one or more links with “Sub-IDs” which we’ll talk about in a bit.
For now you can just think of Sub-IDs as unique identifiers that you can add to the end of your tracking links in order to track multiple things using one link …
So regardless of what you’re doing online or where your traffic is coming from, the first step is to start tracking all of your incoming clicks as best as you can.
The more accurately and precisely the better …
Remember, you can’t optimize what you don’t track.
The next thing you’ll want to track, if it applies to your business, are any desirable “actions” that users take as they progress through your marketing funnel.
This could include – but obviously isn’t limited to – opting in to your email list, registering for a webinar, filling out a form to request more info or schedule a call, simply clicking on other “key” links on your site, or whatever else it may be.
Just think of the most important things that you want people to do as they move through your funnel, and make sure they’re on your list of things to track.
For a lot of people this is simply going to be tracking their opt-ins, and that’s fine.
And lastly there’s your sales. You’ll definitely need to track those.
But that’s it.
That’s all you need to start tracking and optimizing to literally double your online business faster than you’d think possible.
Before we move on though, there’s one more thing I want to say …
Look at that list you just made, will you?
In case I haven’t made it perfectly clear yet, you need to understand that if you can’t track every item on the list you just made, you need to fix that problem right now.
I use Click Magick and you can get it for as little as $12/month.
That little list you just made holds the keys to the easiest money you’ll ever make.
But on the flipside, if you don’t accurately track all the things on that list going forward, the odds of your reaching your goals – for both your business and yourself personally – are pretty close to zero.