Many internet marketers have quit talking about the importance of tracking, or just forgotten about it all together. Many others know that tracking is something that they should be doing, but don't fully understand it or think it is too much trouble and not worth the time and expense. Not too long ago, this might have been the case, but now online business tracking programs are so cheap and easy to use that not taking advantage of them is almost like an online business suicidal attempt.

To help you understand the importance of tracking, let's go ahead and start with the basics. What can you track and test?

Headlines, sales letter introductions, calls to action, PS's, audio, video, testimonials, sales copy layout, sub headlines, bullet points, highlighting, yes and thank you pages, post payment, payment pages, subscriptions, subscription box layout, subscription box presentation, the use of entry pages, lead generation, affiliate signups and sales letters, training, education and what effect that has on your visitors, affiliates and customers, subject lines for your mailings, layout, html, text, web based content, all aspects of the follow-up process, backend sales, front end sales, price, traffic quality, cost per visitor, keywords, visit times dependant on content, titles and headings in your sales copy, your ads, your signatures, your introductions, subscriber conditioning, length of subscriber stay, customer feedback, presentation (of everything), and the list goes on and on.

As you can see there is always something to track and test. If you own or market an internet business and you're not at least keeping a close eye on your statistics for patterns that might emerge, then your online business is probably not running nearly as efficient as it could be.

Unless you start now that is.

So how do you go about tracking and testing effectively? First, I want to make sure that you understand that over a short period of time with few visitors, this isn't an exact science. Nothing will ever flow with any perfect regularity. A technique that got you 20% more sales or signups straight after implementation may well turn out to actually lose sales compared to the alternative over the long term.

In order to track accurately and learn enough to make positive changes, you have to get enough data. Analyzing your sales material over 100 visitors isn’t going to do much for you. Judging it over 3,000 to 5,000 however will give much more accurate results, and that results will only continue to get more and more accurate the more results you collect. This will also allow you to ignore any problems that might come about through anomalies and average out your results.

If you start analyzing you're tracking stats without enough traffic, to many factors come into the equation that can throw off your data and make it appear better or worse than it actually is. Were you getting the same quality traffic from the same place? Was it more targeted than previously? There are many factors that can affect your results. Averaging out over a long period of time is the only way to be sure that the data you are getting back is reliable.

Secondly, only test one thing at a time. If you're going to change the wording of your ad to see if it performs better, than test one sales letter with one headline, and one with another. Whatever you do, don't change six things on one ad, and then proceed to change four things on your second. You might see a definite increase in sales, sure, but how are you going to know what had the effect and how to repeat it in the future? You won't.

You don't want to just test one method one month, and then swap to another method the next month. Look for software that allows you to track both ads over the same time period.

The truth is there are slow times online. The amount and quality of your traffic will change from month to month depending on seasons and other program launch dates. Tracking like this will get you far more accurate results, as your traffic is taken from the same pool, eliminating so many variables that could effectively give you totally incorrect results.

Lastly and maybe the most important is to keep everything. Make a tracking folder. Every time you test something, record your theory prior to tracking, record your stats, your signups, or how many visits you tested and finally keep track of your results. This way, you can go back and test again if you feel that times have changed, or a particular technique has become overused.

See? It's simple to track and test. Five or ten minutes a day using a good tracking program and that's all it takes and the benefits are endless, not to mention how good it feels when you hit the jackpot and can apply sales and recruiting increases 10%, 20% or even 50% over multiple marketing campaigns.