Testing Your Lead Capture Pages

Nicole S. Cooper of The Mailbox Money Blog is a lady who understands the importance of tracking site metrics, adapting her approach to improve the statistics, and enabling her to profit from following some simple steps. Her recent blog post 'A Valuable Lesson Learned About List Building & Popups on your Lead Capture Page' hammers home the point in spectacular fashion.

Like many internet marketers, Ms. Cooper has her site set up to offer visitors the opportunity to sign-up to a mailing list (I've signed up, and will report back!) in order to share her savvy view of internet marketing with prospective customers.

To do this, she uses a scripted pop-up that has quite some customization options, from layout and colors, through to the actual time between the visitor landing, and the pop-up being shown. At the outset, the pop-up was set to appear (almost) immediately.

Important Statistics

When Nicole checked her statistics, she noticed that the average visitor time was around three and a half minutes, and that the bounce rate was around 30%. This means that around 3 in every 10 visitors clicks away immediately, and that of those who stay, they usually don't start around longer than the length of an average pop song.

Being savvy in the ways of testing and tracking, she wondered what would happen if she delayed the pop-up. The result was a reduction in the bounce rate (by 10%) and an increase in the average visit time by more than the delay added to the pop-up.

There's a few things to note here. The first is that the before and after opt-in rate wasn't related in the blog post, but it would be something that needs checking. The assumption that just because the bounce rate has decreased and the visit time increased the number of sign-ups will also have increased needs to be tested.

That said, any time the bounce rate can be reduced, and the visit time increased, by small tweaks such as adjusting the time-out on a pop-up, it's a step worth taking as long as the sign-up rate doesn't decrease. Other points to test would be:

• changing the page at which the pop-up appears on
• testing the performance of pop-ups vs. pop-unders or exit boxes
• checking conversion rates (i.e. is the quality of each sign-up remaining constant or increasing?)

The importance of testing, tracking, and respecting your traffic cannot be over emphasized. Readers will benefit from taking a look at Ms. Cooper's site, starting with the aforementioned blog post.

From Clicks to Bricks in Testing, Tracking, and Marketing

Often people ask how they can apply online testing and tracking principles to a business environment where the customers are split between a bricks and mortar shop and an online presence (be it eBay, or a proprietary web site and shopping cart solution.) The online part is something covered here in great detail, but the principles also apply to offline sales.

In other words, it is as important to track and test in the bricks and mortar world as it is in the clicks and bricks environment. Luckily, while the parameters might change, the general rules remain the same:

• track everything under unique identifiers (mailing list, flyer drop, passing trade, advertising, etc.)
• keep up to date records
• note change, and the effects of change

What is vital, and worth stressing, is that in the offline world, retailers can only measure what is explicitly tracked. Anything that isn’t tracked, can’t later be backtracked in the same way that it can often be on the Internet.

In other words, there’s no big activity log on a computer somewhere, with armfuls of statistics. Any statistic that needs to be kept, has to be manually tallied, tracked, and processed in order to be able to draw any conclusions.

For example : how does a retailer find out whether, for their business, a money off voucher is more powerful than buy-one-get-one-free offers?

They need to be in a position to identify the source of every prospect and customer, ensure that the target market is roughly equivalent, and that the delivery medium (i.e. advert, mail-shot, flyer, etc.) is also equivalent.

To make this easy to implement, it might be a good idea to devise a coding standard that identifies each offer in a way that is both easy to track and easy to identify (and, if telephone order are expected, easy to say and record!) Example coding could be :

• PP AA NNN

The above might be deployed as PP (product ID), AA (advertising medium), NNN (numerical ID), and result in identifiers such as:

• BR MA 001 (Bread, Magazine Advert, first iteration)
• BR NA 001 (Bread, News Advert, first iteration)
• etc.

Businesses might need more, or less, complex identifiers following their product range, advertising avenues, and so on. It can be expanded, but this entails making sure that the old and new schemes remain compatible.

A final thought – always make sure that voucher based offers require that the voucher itself is handed in, that way additional tracking (different voucher colors by location, for example) can be built into the scheme. For those who are true ‘clicks and bricks’ operations : put vouchers in the delivery package, marketing and tracking rolled into one!

Same Page Traffic Testing

Traffic testing should not be restricted to a single measurement on a page. A basic sales page could feasibly start with a bold, red, heading, a subheading, some text, an offer (or call to action, the CTA), and a signature and PS section, with only the click through on the CTA being measured.

However, it is equally possible that different sections of the page will have different response rates. So, any marketer should be aware that, in the same way that a long piece of web copy is designed to catch different people at different points in their emotional decision making, measuring what different visitors do at each point is also very important.

In fact, web copy usually has more than one CTA. Sometimes a sign-up box is floated at a certain point, sometimes there are multiple sign-up or purchase buttons on the page, and so on.

If all these actions are measured under the same category, the information that pertains to what happens next is lost forever. Part of the tracking process revolves around knowing what occurs after the prospect has clicked the CTA button (link, etc.)

So, not only does the action need to be tracked, with a separate ID for each action point, but also these need to be linked to pages that are subsequently displayed, and have specific identifiers, so that they can also be tracked, and a picture built up of various paths through the sales process, or funnel.

Keep tracking, testing, and eventually, profit will follow!

Basics of Online Traffic Testing

First things first : no traffic = no sales. Without a stream of visitors, a site will never make any money; advertisers won’t want to advertise, products won’t sell, affiliates won’t make any income.

However, even exponential increases in traffic don’t necessarily lead to rapid (or even moderate) increases in sales. Subsequently, web site owners need to make sure that they make the most out of each and every visitor.

The typical measure is something known as the conversion rate. Visitors are converted into prospects. Prospects become customers. Customers become repeat customers, and something to be nurtured, and respected.

So, the first step in traffic testing is to set up tracking around the flow of traffic through the site. A simple landing page, followed by sign-up, and upsell pages, for example, needs only a set of three counters to count:

• the number of hits
• the flow to the sign-up page
• the number of sales

This can be expanded to cover tracking by product type, site, and varying price points, upsell packages and so on, but the key for those just starting out is to keep it simple - a free counter from Statcounter.com (for example) and a Google spreadsheet are all that’s needed to get started!