Testing and measuring website campaigns
March 31st, 2009 by Ingrid Cliff
I have been working on a new website for one of my products and late on Sunday night clicked the button to go live so I could have a few colleagues test all the links on their respective browsers, before final prettying up on the site and then sending traffic to it.
The site is currently very ugly as my web designer is still trying to decipher my cryptic notes. How we work is I do the very rough draft for the foundation of the site and she makes it pretty.
The site has a few typos and grammatical errors (proof-reading is the last step on our list of things to do).
It also hasn’t been optimised for the web in terms of keywords in the metatags or images etc – that is still on my list of things to do once we get the design finalised.
The good news is the site and links all seems to work … and even without any promotion, SEO, adwords, social posting or the like – and only one very tiny obscure link to the hidden pages in one of my sites (just to test the flow through), it generated more sign-ups in 24 hours than the previous 6 months of the product on our main site.
The search engines found and indexed the main page and started to send organic traffic to it in less than 24 hours (remind me again about the web designers who say you need to wait up to 6 months before the search engines find you).
This experience has reinforced for me the power of:
- testing and measuring campaigns,
- getting the niche right,
- having a brilliant offer, and
- fantastic copywriting with the right keywords throughout the copy (even if there are typos).
It has also reinforced to me that ugly sites sell – you don’t have to have a beautiful site to get results if you have the other things in place.
So – what is the site address? Well … I can’t tell you (yet). I want to make it a bit prettier (yes the girly part of me wants it to be a bit more attractive before I share it with you all). But you can be sure I will be tracking the stats to see if my prettying up of the site has increased/decreased conversions.
Stay tuned over the coming days when I will announce the site with all appropriate fanfare.
Until next time
Ingrid Cliff
We put your business into words
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Web copywriting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 7th, 2009 at 7:55 am
[...] So many people think that having an effective website means it has to be “pretty” – great images, flash animations, and so on. Reading Ingrid Cliff’s blog lately, I came across a post about a new website she’s creating. You can read the full post here. [...]
April 7th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
If you were using a static html site then yes, it can take up to six months to be indexed. Because you’re using Worpress it is indexed within hours. One of the reasons so many sites are being converted to blogsites!
I LOVE blogsites myself, they’re so easy to use and change around. Not to mention relatively cheap to set up!
Good luck with the new site and look!
June 9th, 2011 at 12:19 pm
[...] So many people think that having an effective website means it has to be “pretty” – great images, flash animations, and so on. Reading Ingrid Cliff’s blog lately, I came across a post about a new website she’s creating. You can read the full post here. [...]
July 13th, 2011 at 10:06 pm
[...] So many people think that having an effective website means it has to be “pretty” – great images, flash animations, and so on. Reading Ingrid Cliff’s blog lately, I came across a post about a new website she’s creating. You can read the full post here. [...]