Continuous Tracking Is Necessary
When you are advertising it’s important to always be tracking. It’s easy to think that once you’ve got a great page making great conversions that you should stick with it. But sometimes things can change.
As you can see here I have 2 splash pages I’ve been advertising. They are both basically the same page, but with one exception… One uses graphics, the other doesn’t (“NoG”). You can see the “Total” “Month” and “Week” GTR (Goal Through Ratio… Not sure if that’s a real term but that’s what I’ve used). They are both pretty much the same until this week where one starts getting triple the results over the other.
Interesting note is that for a small period of time the non graphic version was out performing the graphic version. Then they seemed to even out, and now the graphic version is out performing the non graphic. The Month total hits is about 30,000 and the week is about 15,000.
By always having the tracking data available, I can see changes like this. I then keep the top performing ads on higher priority, and the lower ones on low priority. Then if a page is considerably low I’ll remove it all together. Keeping some traffic flowing on a once hot page can show you when it’s hot again.
In case you were wondering, I’m using the TEtoolbox splash page tracking. I just copy and paste my aweber form into the page, and it tracks the form submission automatically. Very simple and very effective.
Tracking ads is possibly one of the most important issues that any promotional entrepreneur needs to come to terms with.
I’ve made the mistake of thinking I’ve a great splash page and left it rotating around several TEs for ages in the belief it would always have the same impact. That might have been true some years ago but this industry has picked up speed and as you say Tim things do not remain the same for long. The effectiveness of a splash page is certainly a good example of just how important it is to maintain a fresh look. It strikes me that people want a continuous flow of fresh advertising resources to maintain and capture interest in the TE’s they’re promoting which is likely a consequence of the TE industry’s surge in growth. Sorry I’ve digressed a little, but it’s a point worth making because I’ve come to a conclusion that I need to create a fresh splash page for my own site http://www.rpod.biz at the rate of one a month. I also find this a useful mechanism to keep track of what’s happening. Replacing older splash pages at specific TEs with new ones allows me to track their effectiveness or not. Also as you rightly point out, there’s nothing wrong with reintroducing a previously good splash page at a later date as it does seem to recapture some of its initial attraction.