Testing Your Market

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By Jeffery Wood | November 12, 2009

Or more accurately “Testing Your Niche”.

So there you are: You’ve found a market, you’ve done your keyword research and have honed it down to a niche that’s not too broad and not too narrow.

You built a web page and set up the autoresponder with a few messages to get it going. Maybe you have some PLR (Private Label Rights), maybe not.

Now what? You start to drive traffic right?

Well, yes, that’s the whole idea after all, but before you do something big, test with something small. You’ve read about other marketers who talked about testing a market and decided it wasn’t profitable, or how they tested their sales page, etc.

Ever wonder, “How’d they do that”?

One of the ways you can fairly quickly test the waters before you invest a ton of time is with a PPC campaign.

What’s PPC?

Now PPC, in case you don’t know, stands for Pay Per Click. It’s usually associated with Google, though it doesn’t have to be on Google.

Whenever you do a search in Google, the first few results are in a shaded box and called “sponsers”, and they are ads as are the ones on the side of the search results.

People pay to have their ads put there and it costs them a certain amount of money every time someone clicks on their ad, thus “Pay Per Click”.

It’s being on the other side of the Adsense coin so to speak.

This is frequently done to drive a lot traffic fairly quickly to your site. It costs money, but it’s one of the fastest ways you can run a test on something.

How it works

The general idea is that you run your ad (the PPC campaign), drive a bunch of traffic to your site and see what happens…only you’re supposed to be running tests so you know what’s happening. I’ll talk about specific tests in a moment.

On your landing page, sales page, home page, or whatever you want to call it, you should have put some tracking code either from Google Analytics or from StatCounter. I’ve used both, either is fine. Some people have found Google’s Analytics to be a bit overwhelming and thus prefer StatCounter.

They’re both free so experiment. I have one site where I have both on it just so I can see which one I like better.

I have not read it yet (it’s on my list of things to read), but several fellow marketers that I trust recommend Perry Marshall’s The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords.

Subscribe to his free five day course and check it out. And if you decide to purchase it then great, let me know how you like it.

What to watch

You have two different areas that you need to keep an eye on: Your website (duh) and your PPC campaign.

Why the campaign? Because I said so, that’s why.

Okay, it was worth a shot, that answer always worked for my mother.

If you are running a campaign and still not getting traffic, it’s either your ad or your keywords.

Okay, so while you run your campaign keep an eye on your stats. How many people are visiting? From whence do they come (where are they coming from)? Are people signing up (or buying or whatever your call-to-action is)?

It’s not working

If nobody (or very few) are going for your call-to-action then change something. Run the test again (or continue to run it as the case maybe).

What do you change? That can be a post all to itself.

First I’d make sure that your ad and your landing page match. What do I mean? I mean if your ad is talking about building muscle then your landing page should be about building muscle and not about looking muscular by losing weight.

And the reverse is true, if your ad (in this example) is about losing weight, your landing page should be about losing weight, not about gaining muscle to look thinner.

Give them what you promised them in your ad.

If they didn’t match then make them match then run the test again. If they did match then you have a few things you can test.

What to change

Change the headline, then test.

Change the wording in your call-to-action, then test.

Change your free offer (if you offer anything, if not then try adding one), then test.

Change your bonus (if you have one, if not try adding one), then test.

And the list goes on.

VERY IMPORTANT

There’s a principle here that you need to understand. Change ONE thing and one thing ONLY, then test. DO NOT change two or more things and then test.

Why? Because if you change multiple things you won’t know what the hang up was. If you still don’t get your sign-ups or purchases, you won’t know what the problem is because you don’t know if you fixed the initial problem and introduced another or if you missed the boat completely.

Split-Test?

You can also run split-tests. A split test is where you test two things at the same time. That’s different than changing two or more things at a time.

For example, you could run two identical ads going to two different landing pages (Google gives you a way to make the ads show the same amount of time).

Let’s be clear. Both ads say the exact same thing. Each ad points to a different landing page. You check to see which landing page does better.

The two landing pages are mostly the same. They might have two different headlines OR two different offers OR two different bonuses, etc.

The point is that the landing pages are slightly different, not completely different, otherwise you aren’t running a split-test.

You can also split test your ad, by having two slightly different ads point to the same landing page and see which one drives more traffic.

This is how marketers test and fine tune their systems. Make a small change and measure the results.

Things to track

There’s different things to keep track of including (but not limited to) the amount of traffic you get, the conversion rate (the number of people visiting vs the number of people doing your call-to-action), the cost of the PPC campaign vs the amount of revenue (to see if you at least break even with your ads or if you are just throwing money away).

You can test your upsell or OTO (one time offer), and the list goes on.

Conclusion

Now there’s a difference between knowing how to do something and being an expert at doing something. A person who knows basic mechanics can fix his own car to a point, but isn’t necessarily an expert mechanic.

I know how to do this, but I’m not an expert at this. So I deliberately did not go into a ton of detail about the tests. Getting the information is one thing, knowing how to interpret the data you get is another, knowing what to change is yet another.

Happy testing

- Jeffery

P.S. Before you spend a bunch of money on PPC, I strongly recommend that you check out Perry Marshall’s The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords. As I mentioned earlier, sign up for the free 5 day course to check it out.

About Jeffery:
Jeffery Wood, author of "Learn How To Set Up Your Own WordPress Blog And Forum" is a Part-Time Internet Marketer.

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