Measuring Success: Split Tests and Social Media

The home page of Google Analytics. What are these numbers actually telling you about your business?

In my last post on vanity metrics I asked, 

“So how do you measure if you’re creating a larger audience that can help you reach your goal?”

To put it bluntly: the key is to measure how many of your users are taking an action that directly leads to your making money. So how do you do that? 

Page views can’t tell you whether you’re attracting potential customers who become real, live customers. But one of the methods you can use to produce actionable metrics—metrics that indicate whether your audience is getting hooked on what you have to say—is the split-test. 

What is a split test?

Split-testing is also called A/B testing because you are testing two ways of doing something (way A and way B) on two halves of your audience—splitting your audience.

For example, you may present 50 percent of people who land on a particular page with a link that says "Click Here" and the other 50 percent with a link that says "Get It Now." 

If a whole lot more people click on "Click Here," you know that "Click Here" is the better word choice for your link on that page. 

Here's a video that explains the idea, from Optimizely, a company that helps set up and run split-tests.

Why are split-tests hard to execute on social media? 

Because you cannot automatically segment your social media audience this way.

You can't set it up so that half your followers see a post with one type of wording and half see it with another.  Your post will pop up to whomever Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest chooses to show them to. 

How to execute tests on social media anyway

You can still conduct very effective tests using your posts on social media. They may not be perfect split-tests, but they can provide enough data to help you decide whether saying something like "click here" works better for your audience than saying, "Get it now." Here are some options: 

1. Use targeted audiences on Facebook. You can target geographically, by age, gender, and language on Facebook for free. Use this option if you want to see whether a certain message lands more effectively with women, as opposed to men, or with a certain age group. 

 2. Test using time of day and day of week. People often ask, "How often should I post to social media?" The only way you'll know for sure is to run tests. When are the best times of days to post? Should you post more often on certain days and less on others?  

Get a detailed how-to guide on setting up split-tests that answer these questions here. Have you tested these methods? How have they worked for you? Let me know in the comments!

What’s a Vanity Metric? (And Why You Should Care)

The other day I was reading through posts in a private Facebook group for entrepreneurs. 

A woman who had launched her website recently was asking, “What is a good number of page views your first month?” 

You may have asked the same question as you try to build your audience. After all, if you want to build your audience, doesn’t that mean you want more page views? 

Yes and no. 

Charts! 

Of course you want more eyeballs on your site pages. But why? 

Page views don't tell you how those eyeballs got to your site. And that means you won't know whether your marketing has actually made a difference. If that number goes up or down each day, page views won't tell you why. Maybe a baby grabbed his mom's phone (believe me, it happens) and hit Refresh a 1,000 times. Maybe 1,000 babies each did that once. Either way, 1,000 babies aren't going to get you any closer to your goal.  

In other words, a larger audience is not an end; it’s a means to an end. The end is to reach people who can really benefit from your services or products. 

Your “means” is not simply a larger audience; it’s got to be a larger audience of potential customers. 

So how do you measure if you’re creating a larger audience that can help you reach your goal? 

It won’t be from page views, as you know by now. Not only do page views tell you nothing about how someone arrived at your site, they also can't tell you anything about what that viewer did—or didn’t do—next. 

Because of all this, page views qualify as a “vanity metric.” This metric, AKA measurement, doesn't help you make decisions about what to keep doing and what to do differently in order to reach your potential customers. It just tells you that some people have come across your site. 

Here are 3 essential posts about vanity metrics, with some resources thrown in the middle if you'd like to start using actionable metrics: 

1. Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics : Eric Reis, the originator of the term vanity metric, breaks it down: “The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions.” So, how do you figure out which metrics are actionable? … The next post can help with that. 

2. Metrics, Metrics On The Wall, Who’s The Vainest Of Them All? A lot of info here, but the bottom line: 

“When some people pick the key metrics they want to track (also known as key performance indicators or KPIs), the first thing they do is log into Google Analytics and figure out what’s easily accessible. ...

"Start from the opposite direction. Don’t even look at Google Analytics or any other tool. Start with your business. Pick 1-5 metrics that tell you how healthy your business is. This will include things like revenue, number of leads, account signups, and lifetime value.

"Figure out how to force your analytics tools to get you as close as possible to these metrics. If you have to import and merge data into Excel, do it."

3. Once you take the advice above, you'll probably find that you need to set up Goals in Google Analytics, if that's the tool you're using. Google Analytics has a useful tutorial for how to set up goals. (If you're not using GA, start. It's free! Click for SquareSpace or WordPress instructions for connecting GA.)

4. Finally, if you have time, read this story to understand the far-reaching impact of the misuse of vanity metrics. This story of this YouTuber may not seem directly relevant, but it is all about how an entire economy has sprung up around vanity metrics (like video views and clicks) that don't really mean much. Something to think about.