Hey Insiders,

Earlier this month, John was kind enough to invite me to take part in the September coaching call, and amidst the rambling on and on that John and I seem to do whenever we have these marketing chats, we found ourselves touching on an extremely important piece to the puzzle...

That piece is understanding your metrics and how you can use that information to optimize your sales funnel.

You may have heard John occasionally make reference to "butt-ugly websites" that seem to out-sell some of the fanciest darned sites you'll ever see and you may have wondered what makes these ugly sites so successful.

The secret is that while most website owners focus their energy on things like graphics and fancy Flash intros, the ugly websites focus on Conversion.  But what the hell does that even mean?

Well a conversion, in the marketing sense, is someone taking the desired action, at the desired time.  Most of the musicians in here have acquainted themselves with the "squeeze page".  The squeeze page is designed to "convert" a cold-traffic visitor into an email list subscriber.  From there you get to control the interaction with the subscriber and eventually walk them down the path to converting them yet again, this time as a buyer of your music.

Essentially the funnel starts with filling people into the front end at the squeeze page.  From there a few people will sign up to your list and an even smaller number will fall out of the other side of the funnel as a buyer.

If you've gotten your funnel into place at this point, congratulations!  Now it's time to turn it into a well oiled machine (too cliche?) and optimize your funnel so that you are getting more people to enter the funnel and a higher percentage coming out the other side as a buyer.

The way you achieve this is by deliberately measuring your rate of conversion.

The simplest way to do this is by utilizing a few free tools that are offered from google.  The first is google analytics.  Google analytics is a small snippet of code that you copy and paste into every page that you wish to have monitored by google.  What it allows you to do is see where your visitors are entering your website from... whether from the search engines, or referring sites, or from directly typing your url into their browser.

Analytics will also tell you how many pages a visitor viewed while they were there, or if they just left and went elsewhere.

Why is this important?  Well it will let you know first-hand which content is engaging your visitors and which content is not.

However, when it comes to measuring conversions, google offers another simple script called Google Website Optimizer, that will tell you for sure how well your squeeze page and sale offers are performing.

The way optimizer works is that it lets you test different elements of your squeeze page... whether it be a line of text, a color scheme, a graphic, or just about anything else you can put on a web page.  To use Google Website Optimizer, your first step is to take the page you wish to test, then make an almost exact copy of it.  The only difference will be the element that you are testing.

For instance you can test a call to action...  "Click Here To Download" versus "Get Your FREE Track Now!"

What you would do is place a simple snippet of code on both of these almost identical pages and then another piece of code on your thank you page... or conversion page.  Once the optimizer codes are in place, google will automatically alternate the pages to show both variations, so that you can actually measure which element is performing the best.

You may find that one version converts at 10%, while the other converts at 20% or higher!  Now that you can see the clear-cut winner, you can replace the loser with a new variation of the winner and test again.

The point is that when you can see these "metrics", you can ultimately see where you need to make improvements.  You can run this same kind of "split-test" on your sale offer pages as well.

As John pointed out on the coaching call, if you are getting traffic, but not getting sign-ups, then a simple split test on your squeeze page will help you improve.  If you are getting sign-ups, but no sales, then perhaps your sale offer needs a tweak.  Test a variation of your sales page and try to increase your conversion rate.

The point is that if you cannot measure the metrics and see the numbers, then you are working blind and cannot intentionally make an improvement.

Now your autoresponder also allows you to split test your follow-up messages.  This is extremely useful, because both your squeeze page and sales page may be great, but your follow-up messages may be the problem.  But because you are watching then numbers, you can positively identify the problem without pulling your hair out and guessing.

Using Google Analytics together with Website Optimizer will allow you start simple with your ugly website and see results well before you potentially waste a ton of time (or money) on fancy graphics that don't convert.

Set up your Google accounts today and start testing.  Don't let good traffic go to waste!  🙂

-Steve