This is a guest post by Miles Baker

Split Testing, Multivariate Testing, A/B Split, Bounce Rate, Taguchi Method, and HeatMaps are enough terms to make your head spin. However, if you don’t know what some of these terms mean, or even worse - you aren’t using any of these methods in your marketing efforts, then you’re losing out on massive amounts of money and chances are your marketing efforts will be short-lived. Testing and tracking gives you cold hard data that practically makes no-brainer decisions for you! You know exactly what works okay, better, and best, and what doesn’t work, period.

Unfortunately, most online marketers and affiliates don’t even bother doing a simple split-test on their landing or sales pages. Ask most affiliate managers what page converts the best and they’ll tell you what they ‘think’ is best. Sorry, but only cold hard data works for me, and that’s why you need to do YOUR OWN testing and tracking, all the time! In fact, if you want to be a super affiliate you must always test, track, find out what’s working, adapt, and continually repeat the process over and over again.

Now I must make the disclaimer that I’m not a testing and tracking guru, nor do I know everything about the subject, but what I do know is what has worked for me, and that testing and tracking is a never-ending learning process that will not only increase your profits, but evolve you into a better overall marketer.

So now that you know the importance of why you should test and track your marketing efforts, let’s take a look at what’s possible, what kind of data you should be paying attention to, and what easy to use free and paid tools you can use.

In my experience it has always been possible, and sometimes too easy, to increase your CTR (Click Through Rate). You shouldn’t only be testing your Google Adwords Ads, but also split test the copy or headlines on your landing pages, test what checkout page works best, and test different merchants if that’s available. Also test different products, as well as direct downloads vs. sending visitors to a landing page. In essence, test everything you can! And don’t just take someone’s word for what’s working, because most people don’t do the easy work of split testing and they make assumptions or use hearsay to design their pages. Test it for yourself and I guarantee you will learn something new that will increase your profits.

What should you be paying attention to when you’re testing? Well, you not only want to pay attention to simple things like what gets the most clicks, but you should be looking at other factors as well, such as WHERE are people clicking on your page, in addition to what kind of links are getting the best click-through, such as images or text links. Also, look at how long people are staying on your page, and what is the bounce rate (bounce rate is defined differently by different tracking systems but in general it’s the amount of time a visitor stays on your page before leaving or hitting the back button), look at what other pages on your site they may be visiting most (this can give you great ideas on what your visitors may also be looking for).

Pay attention to what happens after you make changes; keep a log, notes, whatever you have to do so you know what’s going on and keep track of all the changes you make and the data you get from those changes. Think of yourself as a scientist, you don’t have to be perfect, but make sound decisions based on the logical data you receive, and also make sure you have enough data. How do you know if you have enough data to make a decision? Well I leave that up to the true math geeks and use a free tool at SplitTester.com. This free tool makes all my decisions a no-brainer.

Another tool I love is CrazyEgg.com because this site has a free version and gives you so much valuable data! If you aren’t using it sign up and copy and paste the one line of JavaScript on your site and you’ll start getting great feedback as to what visitors are doing on your site. CrazyEgg provides you with heatmaps showing where people are clicking, how many clicks each link on your page is getting, and even shows you where those people came from. From using this simple tool you will be able to gather great data you can then use to redesign your site or create split-tests.

There are a ton of scripts and tools for doing split testing, I won’t get into all the different tools available, but the one I currently use is called OpenX and can be downloaded from their site www.openx.org. This is primarily a banner rotation tool, but it allows you to do massive ad split-testing on hundreds even thousands of pages, and that’s what I use it for. Oh yea, it’s also free. Since the latest version I installed doesn’t show you ‘unique’ CTR, I use a special plug-in from www.openadsmods.com. The plug-in is $60, but well worth it if you want to split test ads, buttons, etc. across many pages.

So what about tracking? Well, many people use Google Analytics since it’s very powerful and free. For now though I am not using it. Why? Because as some sites claim, Google will use your analytics data to make decisions on how well you should rank in their natural results, as well as other factors when it comes to Adwords. Google doesn’t officially state this, however what do you think they will do with that data? This could be a good or bad thing, but for right now I’m finding success without using it, so until more information is available I’m staying away.

Here are some Analytics alternatives, however no matter what tracking system you’re using it’s important you are at least using something that will give you the data you need such as page views, visitor time spent on site, bounce rate, page traffic, referrer traffic, etc.

103Bees
Mint
Clicky
ClickTracks
Lodgy
AdFreeStats

Your webhost should also have some web statistics program built in, either AwStats or something else. These programs can be beneficial as well, and so make sure you use them.

I also recommend continually learning about testing methods, read up on definitions if you see something you don’t understand, and also don’t be afraid to start learning PHP as you can easily set up simple split test rotations with a simple PHP script. If you’re just a beginner you can also head over to places like RentACoder and have custom scripts written for as little as $10 to $20.

As an online marketer you really have no excuses not to be doing some kind of tracking and testing in everything you do.

Miles Baker is a 10 year Internet marketing veteran. For more information on him visit his website MarketingWithMiles.com