You may have received an email from me last week where I asked if you would take part in a quick survey — I wanted your opinion on what you think is the most important thing I could be working on.

It was a fairly “self-serving” email so I was delighted that 239 business owners took part – (if you did… thank you.)

Anyway, here’s a quick video where I walk though the results — (or if you want to cut to the chase, beneath the video I’ve written about the results too.)

As shown in the video above, here are how the 239 votes were spread across the 12 product ideas…

1. Lead Page Generator Software – 14.8% (35 votes)
2. Social Media Primer – 14.4% (34 votes)
3. Content Planning Software – 14.0% (33 votes)
4. Headline Generator Software – 8.5% (20 votes)
5. The Ultimate Experts Marketing System – 8.1% (19 votes)
6. Shrink Wrap Your Brain 2011 Edition – 7.6% (18 votes)
7. WordPress Website Theme For Experts – 6.8% (16 votes)
8. The £35,000 Sales Letter – 5.5% (13 votes)
9. Ultimate Business Blogging 2011 Edition – 5.1% (12 votes)
10. Ed’s Little Black Book Of Power Tools & Online Services – 4.7% (11 votes)
11. Video Marketing Primer – 6.4% (15 votes)
12. E-Mail Marketing Dynamite Video Series – 4.2% (10 votes)

As the stats show, there’s a marked gap between the top three ideas and the others, with their only being a single vote separating the Lead Page Generator Software, Social Media Primer training programme and Content Planning Software.

This survey has told me that I need to launch all three of the winning ideas in close succession.

If you took part in this survey – thank you for your time and giving me your opinion — it was very much appreciated.

If you have any questions about this survey, or even questions on how to run surveys like this for your own business, feel free to leave a comment or question below and I’ll endeavour to respond in between product development!

Have a great week,
Ed.

Every business owner should know the answers to the following three critical questions about their web site…

(A) How many visitors did your web site get last week?

(B) What’s your web site’s conversion rate?

(C) And what are your website’s best and most profitable sources of traffic? (Visitors.)

If you don’t know the answers to those questions — or if you don’t know what I mean by any of those phrases — then I can almost guarantee your web marketing strategy is not generating the highest levels of sales and profits.

Why?

Well, first of all, you may actually be getting visitors to your site… but it may not be doing a good job of converting them into sales-leads or customers and clients.

Or you may have an issue that’s affecting one of my mentor client’s web sites… he’s got a web site that is now converting more than 9% of his targeted traffic into sales-leads, but it appears his site is NOT getting the traffic (visitors) he or I had originally been lead to believe.

My client’s been thinking his site needs to be better at converting visitors – whereas I’ve explained that’s no longer the main issue… what he needs more urgently is to simply get more prospects (aka ‘targeted traffic’) on to it.

My client needs regional sales-leads — rather than National or International, so in his case, based on his business and budgetary constraints, I’ve recommend he starts submitting articles and press releases to local publications that are read by his target audience, runs Google Adwords with radial geographic targetting turned on, and other such tactics.

Those tactics will produce a stream of genuine prospects, not to his main site but to landing pages I’ve helped him develop.

Now prior to me getting involved he’d been sold the ‘Search Engine Optimisation dream’… he’d been told that all he needed to do was have a website that appeared highly in Google for certain phrases. Unfortunately he’s discovered that’s very much only one of many things he needs to do.

So he had invested in a website that IS appearing high on Google’s organic (free) search results, but he discovered — thanks to web statistics which he didn’t have access to before — that the traffic he was getting was mostly outside his sales region!!

Also his site is well designed and worded to appear high up in Google, for competitive search phrases… but it’s pretty much useless at getting visitors to convert into enquirers. Typical!

The thing is, without having access to quality data (web statistics), he may have continued to focus on trying to optimise his site for conversion, when in fact the main issue was that he simply needs more local traffic.

The site (or rather the popups and landing pages we’ve created recently) are doing a damn good job of capturing sales-leads and allowing him to perform e-mail marketing.

How are your statistics today?

Ed.

I had 174 responses to my marketing mentor survey last week.

I’ve been toying with the idea of launching my own mentoring programme, and wanted to find out how many people had used a marketing mentor in the past, what level of results they achieved… and basically whether people want or need access to a marketing mentor (or in my case a web marketing mentor.)

The resounding answer was YES! In fact here’s a quick summary of the main statistics…

Have you ever worked with a marketing mentor?
Yes – 55.2%
No – 44.8%

If you answered yes, how long did you have a mentor for?
Less than 2 years – 89.2%
More than 2 years – 10.8%

Did the mentor help increase sales?
Yes, their advice made a huge difference – 20.5%
A little bit – 39.7%
No, our sales stayed the same – 27.4%
We lost sales – 4.1%
The advice seriously damaged my business – 8.2% (SHOCKING!)

Do you like the idea of having access to a WEB marketing mentor?
Yes- 82.6%
No – 17.4%

On the basis of these results I WILL be launching a web marketing mentor programme next week. However, the survey also included some ‘open ended’ questions where people could tell me what was good — or bad — about the mentoring they’ve had in the past. I’ve used that to refine the finer details of how my own menoring will be conducted.

(For example it seems people don’t just want a mentor to give them occasional advice — it seems most people want a lot more than that.)

Anyway, if you want the full scoop on my survey click the video for a narrative of me giong through the results. If you do watch the video I’d love to hear any additonal comments you have — please submit them below at the bottom of this page. Thanks.

To say I’ve learnt a lot from the 174 responses to my survey is an understatement!

My mentor programme launches next week — but since the survey last week I’ve seriously limited the number of people I’ll accept, so that I can be a lot more practical and ‘hands-on’. More details shortly.

Have a great weekend,
Ed.

P.S. Here’s the list of ‘best advice’ and ‘worst advice’ taken from my survey…

The 18 Best Tactics & Strategies Given by Mentors that “Made a Significant Difference” to Sales & Profits.
(Taken from results of Ed Rivis ‘Marketing Mentor’ Survey, March 2009.)

1. Implement systems.
2. Design a marketing funnel.
3. Position yourself as an expert.
4. Don’t compete on price.
5. Focus on specific niches.
6. Profile customers to identify the best ones – then get more of them!
7. Use direct response copywriting.
8. Use time effectively—value it highly.
9. Focus on one thing at a time and follow it to completion.
10. Use targeted marketing aimed at specific people.
11. Get leverage on landing pages, joint ventures, lead generations and special offers.
12. Continuously track, measure and test different tactics.
13. Switch to advisory/consultative selling.
14. Get total clarity and direction.
15. 100% accountability.
16. Stop flogging a dead horse.
17. Trust your instincts more.
18. TAKE ACTION.

The 23 Worst Mentoring Failures—that Either Failed to Produce Results Or Damaged Sales & Profits.
(Taken from results of Ed Rivis ‘Marketing Mentor’ Survey, March 2009.)

1. Not giving practical support/not taking a hands-on approach.
2. Talked too much.
3. Too much advising & not enough listening.
4. Not enough more meetings or e-mail interaction.
5. Failing to understand the company fully — making false assumptions.
6. Not working to an agreed plan.
7. Not setting goals.
8. Not telling the truth!
9. Not delivering on promises.
10. Not ensuring a return on investment.
11. Mentor not walking his talk! (Giving advice he wasn’t following himself).
12. Mentor didn’t understand Internet Marketing.
13. Lack of structure.
14. No formal feedback or review mechanism.
15. Failing to identify a ineffective business model.
16. Not delivering any more specific information than already in his books and website.
17. Asking ambiguous and vague questions then not explaining them or giving any help.
18. Poor advice – think all he was after was the money.
19. Mentoring programme was too fast/too slow.
20. Not driving the learning process.
21. Not thinking between sessions.
22. Not enough focus on results.
23. Failing to pay attention to the cost of their advice in terms of results achieved from it.

I thought I’d share the statistics for my recent newsletter launch. If you’re planning on launching any type of monthly subscription programme this could be interesting for you.

19.9% of my email list clicked a link in the email I sent out announcing the newsletter, and ended up on the newsletter subscription landing page.

(That’s a lot lower than usual — probably because this launch wasn’t a ’24 hour special’ like my other launches. Ongoing promotion of my newsletter will ensure a lot more people on my email list are made aware of the newsletter.)

20.6% of those people who saw my web marketing newsletter sales letter web page ‘converted’ and became subscribers*.

*Regards subscriber conversions: At the moment none of my subscribers have paid anything, because the first issue’s given away free as a trial issue.
If my newsletter’s good enough then hopefully I’ll retain a high percentage of those subscribers over the coming months. It’s my job to make sure the newsletter remains to a very high standard. (I intend to!)

So the next page that appeared after someone had just entered their credit card details and subscribed saw an upsell page offering my £997 flagship home-study programme for £397.

(And for the cynics out there — that really is a genuine one time only offer… you can’t buy it any other way yet — and when it launches it’ll be £497 for 24 hours and £997 thereafter.)

So 6.25% of the people who saw the £397 one time only upsell offer responded and bought it.

The people who didn’t buy it were then offered a £97 downsell and 13.5% of the people who saw that downsell bought it.

Finally everyone ended up on the final page which thanked them for subscribing.

In a nutshell, the results of this launch were exciting. It means I can give away the first issue of my newsletter totally free — and let the upsells and downsells pay for them. (In technical terms it makes the offer ‘self liquidating’.)

I win by getting more newsletter subscribers, and my subscribers win by (a) getting a free newsletter and (b) the opportunity to buy products at massive discounts.

Some more comments and observations…

• I’ve had a few people unsubscribe, but my customer services team haven’t reported any negative feedback. (By negative I mean ‘unconstructive’ or ‘nasty’ feedback.) The reasons have been either because they “can’t afford it at the moment”, or they “found it too technical/basic”. Obviously it’s impossible to create a newsletter that suits everyone at all skill levels. The purpose of the free trial is to allow people to find out and decide for themselves.
• The majority of people who subscribed still are — and feedback I’ve had from many of them is that they “love it and are looking forward to the March 2009 issue”.
• After checking my records I can see that most of the people who didn’t subscribe and instead emailed or left ‘negatively unconstructive’ blog comments about my launch… have never actually bought anything from me before. Hmmm.

Whatever business you’re in — chances are you could also benefit from launching either a free or paid (‘premium content’) programme like a newsletter, members only or loyalty club programme using this type of approach (or a variation of it.)

In a future issue of Web Profits Monthly I’ll be publishing a special report with more detail on exactly how I did this launch. It was quite technical to setup — but now I’ve done it I can share all that with you.

Ed.

In less than two weeks the February issue of Web Profits Monthly will only be available as an expensive back issue.

Don’t miss this opportunity to get the inauguration issue for free and get the inside track on how to use the web to boost the sales and profits of your small or medium size UK business.

*** CLICK HERE to register for your free issue and 30 day trial subscription today. ***

Many of the (small percentage of) website owners who make the wise move of regularly reviewing and using their online marketing statistics — to increase sales and marketing performance — are unfortunately wading in ‘dirty data’.

Their web site statistics that reveal how many people visit their for example includes their own, (and co-workers, investors and other non-customer and non-prospects) web visitor activity.

Which means that reports won’t give a true indication of site activity, and could give skewed results, leading to incorrect decision making.

For large sites with a lot of traffic this is not too much of a problem. But any web site that has a low volume of traffic, this ‘dirty data’ can lead to ineffective decision making due to the skewed results.

To be able to make effective decisions on how to optimise your website and marketing budget you need to clean your data… to eliminate anyone who is administering, designing, editing or testing the site.

With web statistics packages like Google Analytics it’s easy.

It allows you to ‘filter’ web site activity for specific IP Addresses, (which are the unique numbers you and I leave behind every time we browse around any web site.)

Ask everyone who works on your site, including members of staff, design agencies, outsource workers, interns, content writers etc.. — ask them to submit their IP Addresses to you. (They can use a simple online facility like www.WhatsMyIP.org to find out what it is.)

Get them to email you their IP Addresses, and then add that list to the IP Address Filtering facility in your chosen stats package, so that in future, the statistics are cleaner and decisions based on those statistics will be more effective.

And if you don’t chack your statistics and don’t know how small tweaks can improve your sales and marketing results, check out my Stats Faceslap! home-study programme.

-Ed.

The following two ‘tweaks’ have the potential to increase online sales, opt-ins, subscriptions, sign-ups, and other types of ‘web conversion’ by up to 300% or more (example below).

It’s so simple, any website owner should be able to take advantage of it. (Most decent web developers will be able to do either of these tweaks with their eyes half shut and for a low fee.)

The irony is that I suspect few website owners will be able to do the following, for one main reason — they don’t know the opportunity is there because they’re not reviewing their website statistics.

Anyone who doesn’t have access to — or regularly review their website statistics — won’t be able to use the following tactic. If that applies to you, I strongly recommend you start tracking website statistics and online activity as soon as possible. (And if you don’t know where to start, check this out.)

Okay, let’s look at the technique.

Goal Conversion Funnel Reduction.

If you own Stats Faceslap! you should have been given online access to a video about this. Please contact customer services if you’re missing the link to the resources page.

Nearly all commercial websites feature one or more forms where visitors are asked to submit information. Sometimes there is a whole sequence of pages that visitors have to step through before the complete the data submission.

Many ecommerce sites (online shops) have a sequence of pages customers need to step through to go and pay for whatever items have been added to their online shopping basket.

Many corporate sites may have enquiry and quote requests pages. News websites may have a set of pages people step through to pay for a subscription. And so on.

Assuming your website has one or more pages where people submit information, here’s how to increase how many people successfully make it all the way through that sequence.

First of all you can…

1. Reduce the amount of information you ask people to submit.

Only ask for the minimum information required for you to be able to fulfil. If you have a website form that asks people for their personal information in return for access to a downloadable report or whitepaper, don’t also ask them for postal address if you can avoid it.

The rule is that the more information you ask for, the less people will want to fill in the form. If you ask for any information that is not absolutely necessary, conversion almost always drops.

Secondly…

2. Reduce the number of pages in the sequence.

If your sales or enquiry forms are spread over more than one page, (like a ‘checkout’ sequence for an e-commerce store, or a complicated quote request form), you may want to find ways of not only simplifying the data capture forms, but also reducing the number of pages.

If you are able to simplify and reduce the number of pages your prospects have to step through, you may see a significant increase in how many sales or enquiries you get.

Here’s an extreme and quite compelling example… (Source: The Marketing Experiments Compendium, Volume 1. Sherpastore.com).

A large online publisher was experiencing a low rate of online subscription. Out of 10,245 visitors they got 27 subscribers… a visitor to subscription conversion rate of 0.26%.

Then they reduced the number of pages in their online subscription process — a long sequence of 9 pages — down to just 3 pages.

After the change — another 10,314 visitors passed through the site, resulting in 107 subscriptions… a visitor to subscription conversion rate of 1.04%.

That’s a 300% improvement… they tripled their sales by reducing and simplifying online forms.

What forms and sequences can you simplify or reduce on your site?

-Ed.

At 12pm tomorrow (BST, which is GMT+1) my new Stats Faceslap! home-study programme launches on a special offer.

For 24 hours only — until 12pm Thursday — it’ll be available for £36.05 instead of £103.00.

It’s a comprehensive two disc DVD programme that shows how to measure and track online activity, including any type of sales or response that affects bottom-line performance.

Disc one contains a detailed overview to more than 26 critical marketing statistics any site owner should be tracking diligently, every week.

It also features a step by step guide to setting up a system that integrates ALL statistics together into a single weekly dashboard — even those made by phone, fax, postal or face to face — but all as a result of an initial visit.

Offline sales statistics are commonly overlooked by many small business with websites that pass judgements on their web sites effectiveness without the full picture.

Sometimes the feeling is “I’m sure our site helps our business…” when in fact it’s actually doing diddly squat for it.

The system I reveal shows the full extent of how a website’s helping a business grow… and sometimes the truth may at first feel like a slap in the face (hence the name of the programme.)

The second DVD then goes into a lot more detail, including more advanced topics like how to actually use statistics to run test campaigns that continually allow anyone to find the best ways of increasing traffic, build lists of hot prospects, generate enquiries and most important of all… increase sales.

Don’t miss tomorrow’s special if you want 65% discount on my most important programme yet.

-Ed.

Are you email marketing? If so, and you use AWeber, there’s some great news. (And if you don’t use AWeber you really should consider their services.)

I’ve been on a special beta test programme for AWeber (aff) over the last few months. I’ve had to access to some awesome new facilities, which they’ve just announced are now publicly available.

Here’s a short list of some of the best features:

• You can now very easily see exactly when subscribers click links in messages (meaning it’s a whole lot easier to determine best time to send different types of campaigns).
• You can identify and send messages to subscribers who didn’t open or click on your previous emails.
• You can send emails to subscribers who clicked but didn’t order.
• See which email messages subscribers are opening, which links they’re visiting, and where on your website they’re going after clicking links inside email campaigns.
• They even have ecommerce analytics built in so you can track revenue generated by specific email campaigns. (Anyone who sells anything online and uses email to do that — and if they don’t they should be — this must rank as one of the most empowering features ever added to email marketing software.)

I don’t know of any other email marketing service provider who provides features like this. Congratulations to AWeber, they deserve to be industry leaders with stunning innovation like this.

If you want your web site to do more for your small business and are not yet doing any email marketing, click here (aff) to get started.

I’ve been delighted to take part in the AWeber beta test programme, and I’m excited for everyone who now gets access to these amazing facilities.

-Ed.

P.S. Given that many people aren’t even tracking basic online statistics, I have a feeling this post may not make sense to a lot of readers, which is something I’m about to address.

My Stats Faceslap! web marketing statistics (web analytics) home-study programme is launching at 12pm (BST) this Wednesday, on a 65% discount special ‘launch offer’ for the first 24 hours.

Continuing on from yesterday’s answers to last Friday ‘web marketing statistics question time’, here are my answers for the remaining questions.

There are some powerful tips in both the answers AND the questions themselves – I hope you’re able to use this information with great effect.

Shuaib (who had obviously just been listening to Paul Gorman talk about writing powerful headlines in Copywriting Gangster!) asked “How to Permanently be on the Driving Seat of your Business & Website & Monitor The Speed, Volume & Quality of Traffic Entering, Purchasing From & Leaving your Site on One Hi-tech Real-time Interactive Dashboard That Then Allows You to Continually Tweak your Marketing Strategy to Super-charge your Business By up to 73.9%!”

That’s a meaty question Shuaib!

And the answer is IN the question.

To be on the driving seat of any business you have to be continually monitoring performance and results.

I think the old saying “work ON your business not IN it” applies here. Spending any money on web site design, development and promotion without monitoring results is a dangerous situation.

Web sites should be an investment, not an expense.

The trick is to ask what your site should be doing for your business (for example generating sales leads) then find ways of constantly tracking not only how many sale-leads it generates but how profitable those sales leads are — and that’s where most stats packages fall short and why I use a manually collated master dashboard that integrates data from ALL sources.

I go into it this a lot more in Stats Faceslap, but this is the secret any business can use to start dramatically improving sales.

Tom Brownsword asked “For somebody like me (who knows that he should be doing this but is simply overwhelmed with other stuff), what’s the easiest, least expensive way (both in terms of time and money) to get the stats you need?”

I get outsource workers to quickly and inexpensively collate my stats from the various sources each week. That saves me time so I can spend more on working ON my business rather than in it.

There are some other tools more related to search engines that are worth checking out, but with just Google Analytics and AWeber used side by side you can get an incredible depth of data.

He also asked “And as a somewhat obvious follow-up, how do you properly analyze them to get the information you need to make changes?”

Well the incredible depth of data is actually a problem… “TMI” (too much information!).

For years I’d not really use my stats properly because of information overload syndrome — now that I get a dashboard compiled by other people on my desk each week, with all my web sites at a glance — I’m finding I’m actually using stats to improve things — not merely for fascination.

Lucy from Xero.com said “One thing I really want to understand easily from my web stats is a quality versus quantity question.

Obviously its nice to say we have 1000s of visitors but I’d like to know as much as possible about the ones who end up as customers as they are the most important.”

This was one of my favourite questions, because it’s so salient for me based on recent personal experience.

The number of people who visit my blog shot up by quite a few thousand in April, as a result of focused testing on new traffic sourses. And it was all a waste of time — it was unprofitable traffic.

So I plugged those new traffic sources and let my traffic flow reduce — but I’m more profitable.

There are a lot of ways to determine traffic quality.

In my opinion one of the easiest ways is to define ‘goal conversion funnels’ — let Google tell you which source of traffic is most likely to convert and then leverage those sources and drop lesser converting traffic sources… unless it’s free.

However, what many web marketers say is ‘free’ traffic (like organic search engine traffic) is actually very expensive traffic, if they count in the hundreds or thousands of man hours spent on on and off-page optimisations.

Great questions from everyone thank you.

And hopefully I didn’t slip in too much jargon in the above answers? Stats Faceslap does a much better job of explaining all the above in plain English.

At the moment it looks like I’ll be launching it on my blog here on Thursday – I’ll confirm tomorrow.

-Ed.

Here’s the first batch of answers to last Friday’s ‘web marketing statistics question time’. (Some of the questions needed long replies so I’ve split them over today and tomorrow.)

There are some powerful tips in both the answers AND the questions themselves – I hope you’re able to use this information with great effect.

Karin H. made more of a comment than a question — but it contains a great tip about how to combine more than one statistic.

The most important/useful stats tell her “which search result page on any search engine my visitor found the page he/she landed on”.

And that’s a powerful technique to optimise any site.

Let your statistics package (hopefully you have one and are tracking web stats) tell you which specific pages visitors land on the most — and which keywords they used on the search engine to find your page.

Then optimise your pages around those keywords.

In other words, give visitors what they were looking for and you’ll get far greater levels of sales and response.

Great tip thanks Karin.

Juliette Player asked a question about the “Average time on site… what is viewed as an ‘improvement’ to this fig?”

She made the observation that “if the visitor is having to dig around in the site for what they require then they will spend longer on the site; however, with improvements in navigation etc. they might find what they need more quickly and therefore spend less time on the site.

So in some ways isn’t a reduction of this figure an improvement?”

Great question, and you’ve hit the nail on the head!

Big business marketers who focus on building brand use the time on site to measure less tangible metrics like ‘brand exposure’.

However, for e-commerce and smaller businesses who need more tangible response, time on site is only important when tweaking it (either way) improves response in the form of actual sales or enquiries (sales lead generation).

The key is all about getting visitors to take action.

If a tweak to a site (like making phone numbers more prominent) means more sales are taken offline, then site performance will improve, but the overall time on site reduces.

So yes you’re absolutely spot on.

And there are two things from this — don’t isolate statistics (which is why I get all my most critical stats compiled into a dashboard each week so I can easily correlate them side by side) and secondly, realise that what a statistic means to one business may have a totally different meaning to another business.

Example: Time on site on this blog is relatively low because most visitors are regular readers who are keeping up with what I write.

So they visit, read the latest article, and then go.

An e-commerce site on the other hand hopefully has a higher time on site as people browse around — but it all comes back to what you said above about improved navigation. If they are coming to the site from the search engines for a specific product and are able to find it quickly, and make a quick payment or telephone enquiry then you have a good site even if the time on site is relatively low.

Cindy King asked a number of great questions about web statistics with the main one being “Please help me choose how to set statistic tracking up.”

For most business sites I recommend Google Analytics. And because they provide detailed instructions on how to add it to any site, I think they’ve saved me the job of explaining it here.

Actually, for WordPress blogs it’s even easier — just install a plugin and let that do the work for you.

Sign up for a Google Analytics account first, then run a Google search for ‘google analytics wordpress plugins’ or similar and there are loads of time-saving plugins you can download for free to help you add it to your blog.

Burton Kent asked “How to effectively track leads through your sales funnel?”.

Now looking at Burton’s blog I see he is quite technical, which explains his question which is quite advanced.

He specifically asked “If I have an adwords ad, which leads to a signup to my email newsletter, which leads to a sale of my book, I’d like to track all of them through each step.

There are lots of different ways of doing this.

The challenge as you’ve no doubt realised is that a signup to your newsletter can happen today, and the same person buying your book could happen weeks or months later, after they’ve cleared their cookies. So Google Analytics may not see it’s the same person.

What you can do is track on two separate levels, and then ‘join’ the data for analysis later.

So for example — and assuming your keywords are divided into specific categories as much as possible — get your Adwords to send a URL code to your squeeze page.

A line of PHP script parses the code from the URL and adds it as a hidden form field.

When someone signs up to your newsletter, the code can be stored as a custom field in AWeber (or whatever database you use.)

Finally, as people on your list buy the book, you’ll be able to cross reference with the newsletter data and determine which AdGroup they came in on.

And then you’re in a really powerful position to optimise your campaigns based on profitability, not just initial conversion.

Burton also asked a second question which I’ll mention here because it contained a critical element to making the most of web statistics to help a business grow.

He asked “How can I use statistics to come up with specific elements to test, optimize and otherwise improve? (Stats in themselves are worthless unless you use them somehow.)”

Coming up with specific test elements is the key to putting all this together.

There are SO many stats that it’s all too easy to not do anything with it.

In the last session of my Stats Faceslap programme I explain how to identify which stats are most important based on the type of business you operate (online or otherwise). I’ll be announcing the launch of that programme any day now, but in advance I’ll give few pointers.

FIrst of all, forget trying to use ALL the possible stats. Work out which stats are the most critical to your business, the strip those out for analysis each week and for comparison with previous weeks so you can see trending.

Google Analytics can provide a tonne of information, but on it’s own it will miss other critical data related to email marketing, RSS, search engine keyword rankings and back-link counts (all explained in Stats Faceslap).

So the key is to pull all the most critical stats together for side bvy side comparison and forget the rest.

Also create a test plan — a schedule of what you want to improve and HOW you intend doing that. Then weekly stats give you the feedback to see how you’re doing.

And Burton’s comment that “Stats in themselves are worthless unless you use them somehow” is so true.

For years I’d ‘occasionally’ log into my stats package and view them with interest, but not really implement any changes as a result. It was a total waste of my time.

These days I have a system to collect stats from the various sources, that eliminates all the stuff I don’t want to see — and I have a plan to actually use those stats to improve sales and profitability.

Answers for the remaining questions will be posted tomorrow.

-Ed.