If you have a website or have some space where you want people to visit when they are online, how do you check in with them or decide if you are heading in the right direction or delivering what your visitors and your potential clients and customers want? Just about all of us guess… we listen to out website designer and go with the pretty pictures that we like and the content that sounds good to us. Is that the correct way to go? I doubt it.

tracking and testing

If it was, we would all be rich and living the life of luxury. You see there is only one fool proof way to continue to grow your website and expand on the good things that people are loving and reducing down the things that people steer clear of and that is by testing and tracking your content, your pages and your complete online existence, and then testing again and making the subtle changes that enhance your visitors experience and therefore making each visitor more conscious of you and what you do and then ultimately drawing them into becoming a client or customer of yours.

You see, whatever people tell you is the right content to have or the perfect image placement, your only way of knowing if it works is if the statistics tell you that more visitors are staying for longer and becoming customers. I mean, isn’t that what you want? Even if you have a personal blog and are writing about your pet giraffe, you are wanting to have the reader buy into your story, stay a little longer and promote your story to their friends.

So your visitors visit… do you know where they come from? Is facebook providing more visitors than a google search? Is your website even on Bing or does Yahoo show you have posted your giraffe story? In all these, where is the best place for you to concentrate your efforts?

This is where your tracking will take you from a write, post and hope scenario to a write, post and track, assimilate the information and then give the visitor what his or her interest demands. That is how you get and keep your customers. By providing them with the product they are after and making sure you give them a darn good experience in the process. If you want them to love you or your product then it had better more than match their expectations. You are able to do this by tracking and testing each page they visit and you test pages against pages or delivery A against
delivery B and so on. You don’t stop or discontinue, you forever improve and adjust to match your visitor and ultimately your customer’s requirements.

How do you do it? Well for a start there is google analytics. This would be the bare minimum. Search for tracking and testing your website. There are a number of useful tools and ways to keep tabs on what is happening on your site. I use Prosper202 which is a self hosted program to achieve my tracking knowledge. There are others like hypertracker that are subscription based. How you choose to get the statistics depends on your own ability and knowledge. The subscription based tracking is far easier to implement but then you pay for that privilege.

Testing and tracking, tracking and testing is the one secure way you can improve your overall customer experience. If they come in their droves you are onto a good thing, if they stay, you are onto something better. You had better be bloody sure you know why they came and what made them stay or they will disappear out the back door very quickly.