Tracking vs. Testing Your Marketing: You’ve Now Been Warned

Here’s what’s going on: Since I’ve come back to Vancouver, Canada I’ve been meeting with several business owners and a handful of the top advertising agencies in the city.

It’s a habit to take each conversation into talking about their business development and sales efforts and what their doing with

In part I’m happy. Why? Because many companies and agencies are tracking their results.

The internet has made finding out how many people come to your website, where they come from and how long they stayed on your website a breeze.

That’s good news.

It’s great to hear that agencies are having to become more accountable and that companies are interested to know ‘how well’ a campaign did.

Statistics like these are extremely valuable. Not looking at them would be a tragedy, an injustice to your marketing.

But folks, tracking statistics is just the start.

Tracking the results of a single ad or website page is great…but without testing…oy vey, you’re missing what it’s all about.

You see, having all that valuable data is fine but it doesn’t mean much if you don’t have anything to compare it to…to know its potential.

This isn’t information I’ve just invented.

$100 million plus financial service and publishing companies that really understand marketing will never send out just one sales letter or ad. They will, without a doubt test sending out two variations or more of a sales letter.

Or send out a new letter to compete with an old letter.

Often times two ads with the exact same body copy, the exact same offer, but with a different headline…can increase your response by 50%, 100% or more.

Putting together a mailing or ad campaign with no variations is such a waste. You roll it out…tally up the results and then what…it was poor, so so, great.

You can’t really know how well it did or more importantly could have done if you didn’t test it.

Tracking is a given. But if you’re not testing your marketing…you have no idea how well you could do…you might be sitting on a potential gold mine.

So how do you test your marketing?

• You can try different headlines on ads.
• You can split-test web pages that your customers first see.
• You can try different images, layouts, offers and much more.

Here’s An ExampleLet’s say you sending out a sales letter. You send out 3 sales letters. 500 of the Version A. 500 of Version B with a different headline. And 500 of Version C with a new offer.

You track the results as they come in. Guess what? You find out that Version B’s headline got 15% more responses than Version A’s. Even more important you find that Version C’s new offer pulled 50% more orders than the offer in Version A and B.

So what do you do now? You merge the offer from Version C with the headline from Version B….send out the letter to the remaining customers on your list.

You’ll be getting a higher response rate and many times the sales.

Knowing this you’d be silly to send out the Version A letter only and track its results.

Do yourself a favor. Don’t just track. Track and test.

You’ll thank me for it and so will your bank.

To your success,

Michael Zipursky