Microtesting Analytics
Understanding Results of Your Microtesting
After you have deployed the microtest, you will want to not only understand how each proposition PPC ad performs, but also how long the landing page is able to hold visitors, how many signups/purchases you gain from each (referred to as "conversions") and other interesting data which may pop up.
The most efficient way to do this (and again, the method which will provide you with seemingly endless tutorials/resources/help) is to link your Google AdWords with Google Analytics. This is a one-minute task, is handled semi-automatically within something like Unbounce or Squarespace, and allows you to understand the entire picture of how your propositions are performing relative to each other and overall.
Here is a brief video on the most common metrics for AdWords. Please watch the following 3:09 video.
Video: Understanding AdWords reports and statistics (3:09)
The video below is specifically about the linking of AdWords and Google Analytics, and its value in allowing us to understand more about the path and actions visitors take after clicking an ad. Please watch the following 4:31 video.
Video: Benefits of Linking your Google Analytics and Adwords Accounts (4:31)
A Note on Your Early Adopters
Aside from what you will learn from the quantitative side of analytics, you can not underestimate pairing those learnings with the qualitative insights you can gain from talking to early adopters. Whether it is something formalized such as an online survey to those visitors who took an action, or simply a phone call a week later to understand their thoughts and expectations, this small step can be invaluable to understand the story behind the analytics.
It is important for us to remember there are people represented by all of those analytics and metrics, and if they have purchased or signed up for more information, their identity is known. What you may find is that you can fall into a certain "stock ticker" mentality as you sift through all of the analytics, where you believe that all answers can be found in the numbers. Sometimes you may find that an ad did extremely well in bringing people in to the landing page, but the landing page did not "convert" well... or that the landing page did an excellent job of keeping visitors, but few purchased or took action. These are the cases when you would want to take those in the minority and contact them to see if there were obstacles they saw, but were able to overcome.
For example, in the case where visitors are spending an average of 10 minutes on the landing page but not taking action, you can take the small handful of those who did order and talk to them. They may say things like, "I had a really hard time finding the order box, but when I did, I was OK," or "the site was really, really slow," or "the video crashed twice, but worked the third time, and that's why I bought." Any one of those insights will help you clear the analytic fog to understand what may have been the obstacles causing the majority of others to leave.