Lead Generation Effectiveness through Opt-In Forms

Test: Opt-in Traffic Quality From Various Sources

There are many different search engines and search networks available to us as advertisers.

Let's be clear on something. Traffic from one source is not the same as another. Even traffic from Google and Yahoo is totally and utterly different. Google may convert sales better for one industry, while yahoo will convert better for another. The same goes for generating opt-ins and this split test will help you determine which traffic sources are the best to use.

To implement this test, you will want to create multiple web pages, and include your opt-in forms on these pages. You will want to make sure that you label your forms differently so that you can tell which leads are coming form which opt-in form (and consequently, which page). You can actually label different forms through Aweber, and then query to see the results.

Your setup may look like this:

Google Traffic goes to: www.yourpage.com/googletraffic.html
Yahoo Traffic goes to: www.yourpage.com/yahootraffic.html
MSN Traffic goes to: www.yourpage.com/msntraffic.html
Miva Traffic toes to: www.yourpage.com/mivatraffic.html

On each of the above pages, you will have an opt-in form that adds users to a single mailing list, but each form will have it's own unique ID. This will allow you to determine how many subscriptions to your list were generated from each traffic source.

You will want to drive traffic to the pages from different search engines, and determine the overall CPL (cost-per-lead) of each search engine. The calculation to determine this will look like this:

Traffic Source Cost / Traffic Source Opt-ins = Cost-Per-Conversion

The lower your CPL is, the more effective the traffic source is for generating a lead. You may find out that within your particular industry that alternate search engines will be more cost-effective than Google or Yahoo, but this is something that you need to TEST. Yahoo and Google typically yield the highest volumes of quality traffic so these will likely be the starting traffic sources that you use for your test.