BitCom Affiliate Services

Market/Site Testing

If you want to succeed online you must know what your customers want. But how do you find out what they really want?

The beauty of online marketing is just about everything is trackable. You can find out where your visitor has come from, where they go on your site, and where they go when they leave. Of all marketing and advertising mediums it may be the best for evaluating your customer.

Important Site Metrics

Here are the main site statistics that you must manage to succeed. These are rated in order of importance. Of course what's important to a merchant selling a product will be different than for an affiliate selling other people's products.

Conversion Rate

Some say content is king. But if that content doesn't convert visitors to customers who cares. Knowing what percentage of your visitors actually buy for any given product or merchant is THE metric that indicates successful marketing.

Visitors Per Day

Of course knowing how many visitors you get to your site is critical to your success. If "Conversion is King" then visitors per day may be queen.

Pageviews / Visit

Pageviews per visit can reflect how well your site engages your audience. An increasing number of pageviews per visit can indicate that your content is interesting, therefore visitors are spending more time browsing it. However, a high pageviews per visit metric can also indicate unecessarily complication processes such as checkout or product browsing.

Items / Order

If your site has a suggested product feature to encourage add-ons, you would benefit by tracking how many items you sell per order.

Average Order Value

While your target average order value will vary greatly based on your industry, it would be wise to monitor this metric over time. Ideally, you’d like to see a year over year increase.

Landing Page Bounce Rates

A bounce occurs when a visitor visits a page on your site, and immediately clicks away and goes no further. High bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors including excessive loading times, irrelevant content, unnactractive site design, etc. Be sure to monitor your bounce rates on all your important entry pages including your home page and any SEO or PPC landing pages.

Traffic Sources

Google Analytics (see below) breaks visit sources into 3 categories: Direct visits (from typing your URL directly), Search engines visits (both SEO and PPC), and refferring sites (any other sites linking to yours). Obviously, the percentage of visits from each of these sources will vary for every site. However, as your brand grows, you’d like to see more visits coming from direct URL entry. These tend to convert better.

Orders Per Customer Per Year

Come up with a calculation of how many times a customer order per given time period. This serves as a good tool for determining how much you can afford to spend on marketing or re-marketing. It's also an important indicator of Lifetime Customer Value.

Shopping Cart/Checkout Abandonment Rate

Measure what percentage of visitors abandon the shopping process at each step in your checkout. For example, how many abandon after adding an item to the cart? After entering shipping & billing info? After entering credit card info? Too high of an abandonment rate could signal a serious checkout problem.

Testing Tools

Google Analytics

Maybe the best testing tool for the money. Of course it's free so that makes it a no-brainer.

This tool will give you so much information it will make your head spin. But it just may be spinning all the way to the bank.

Click For More Information

Marketing Experiments

Their slogan says it all... "Discover what really works."

They focus their "experimentation" on optimizing marketing communications. They test every conceivable approach and then publish the results (at no charge) in the Marketing Experiments Journal.

Here's some examples of their recent "briefs."

Simple Tests, Significant Gains - How our partner increased revenue by 130% with small changes.

Essential Metrics For Online Marketers - How to create a simple metrics dashboard to find out what really matters.

Email Marketing Tested - We examine research findings to discover what factors determine the efficacy of online marketing email copy.

The ROI on PPC vs. Affiliate Marketing - Which gives the best return on your investment - Pay per Click advertising, or building strong affiliate partnerships?

If you love any kind of marketing this company will have you sitting on the edge of your chair. The knowledge here is truly priceless. And it's all free.

Marketing Sherpa

Actually Marketing Sherpa and Marketing Experiments joined up in 2007. But Marketing Sherpa is focused a bit more on market research from a survey point of view. They also focus on case studies and watching successful online marketing firms closely. They publish periodic handbooks, benchmarks, and marketing guides.

Click Here For More Information