| April 2006
Test your online forms and
email addresses
If you have important email addresses and online
forms such as inquiry forms on your web site
you need to make sure they are working or you
could loose potential business.
We’ve heard from a number of webmasters
after days or weeks have gone by before they
realized an important form on their web site
was not working.
You should make a list of important email addresses
on the web site and any online forms (inquiry
forms, sign up forms, etc) and periodically
test them.
If you have an important inquiry form that
usually gets filled out a few times a week then
you might want to test it once a week. On the
other hand if you have a form that is usually
filled out a few times a day you might want
to have somebody filling in a daily report of
the number of times the form was submitted and
if there were no submissions the day before,
test it.
Some webmasters ask if testing will hurt the
conversion tracking and ROI calculations we
usually do for search marketing campaigns. The
answer is probably not. Yes, the number of times
the form is tested will get added in to the
total traffic numbers etc, but this is usually
not a problem.
For search engine advertising campaigns, such
as Google Adwords campaigns, we usually have
tracking code on the “success pages”
of the site (such as in the “Thank you”
pages for form submissions). This tracking code
only counts these conversions (or page views)
if the visitor originally came to the site after
clicking on a search engine ad. So any test
you perform will not be counted in these numbers
since you didn’t come to the site from
a search engine ad (actually you need to make
sure you don’t use the same computer to
test your forms that you may have also used
in the last 30 days to test a search engine
ad.)
For many clients we use advanced analytics
to determine conversions and help calculate
ROI. We are able to isolate traffic, conversions,
and page views to visitors who reach the site
after searching on specific keyword phrases
or after coming from other referral sites. So
again your testing will not be included in these
numbers.
Finally, we can often filter out all traffic
coming from your facilities using these advanced
analytics tools.
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