Why Tracking and Testing Are Key

By David Bullock

If you have a website that is supposed to make money, one of the most important activities that you can do is tracking.

Tracking is an electronic way of tagging the people who visit your website. Testing is an electronic way of showing the visitors on your website different versions of your website. Think of it this way. As someone comes into your online store, you greet them.

As you welcome them into the store you place a sticker on them that first counts them and lets you know that they are in the store. As the visitor walks around the store the sticker allows you to see where they are and what they are doing. That is all tracking is.

Testing is a matter of showing the visitors different displays, depending on when they come into the store. Look at it as though your visitors are standing in line waiting to get into the store. One enters via the right-hand door and the next enters through the left. Both are tagged and counted before they go into either door. This “right, left, right, left” continues with the other people who are in line.

Then you just wait to see if the people going into the right door buy more than the people who went into the left door.

If you are not tracking, you really don’t have an idea about what is going on at your website.

How will you know if what you are doing is working? Without tracking, you are hoping that what you are doing is working and you are hoping that it continues to work. Remember, the first step to testing is tracking, and once you understand tracking, testing is just one step away.

Once you start testing, all you are really doing is asking the market how they would like your website to look, what they would like your website to say and how they would like you to say it.

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