the wonder of the web – tracking | martin gover dot com

the wonder of the web – tracking

Posted by admin on 1/05/10 • Categorized as data,internet marketing,tracking

In business most things are uncertain. We like to pretend we analyze the data before we start (because if we are N American we are addicted to data), but in the end, the entrepreneur, the driven businessperson just goes ahead and does it. If it works, the facts were known, if it fails, well the information was ‘incomplete’.

As humans (again especially N American humans) we tend to confuse risk with uncertainty. Risk is something we made up so that we can feel we are in control of things, uncertainty is… Life – thus the global economic collapse where hubris (- and greed-) but mostly hubris believed uncertainty was for children and risk was real men, and women – I digress…

In business if from day-one, for little money you could test and test and test, and for little money have all the analytics in place – well, that would be heaven.

How do you test a car launch? Or a detergent product launch? Or a movie launch? or…

well you can do little tests in Peoria and hope the people you choose are a good cross section of everywhere else.And hope the people you choose aren’t just telling you what you want to hear because your asking. And hope the people that you choose to test arent put into an artificial environment, or a peer pressure environment so that, really, the testing is useless…

So you do it again and again and pretty soon your test costs, your analytics, your publicity, your advance costs are sky rocketing.

But then you decide to start a little internet business, with a computer you already have, and an internet connection you already have, so you launch a a website or a sale letter or a PPC campaign, and your market is…well…most of the world. And your transport cost are…zero. And your start-up costs are…close to zero. And your tests costs…?

To draw a bad analogy – von Braun and his V2 rocket had 4 elements of telemetry(testing). Testing was painful, laborious and expensive. It took 20 launches (and crashes) just to get the propellant shut off right.

Apollo 11 that went to the moon had 3,552 elements of tracking.

Your start-up internet business, if you pay attention, has built in, for (mostly) free, hundred of tracking tools and testing tools that would make GM and P&G drool. Free.

Just put this piece of code on your page, just go through say Clickbank, or Aweber, or a Cpanel, or Google analytics and you have more analytics and testing procedures than you can , well fire a rocket at.(and do you know what they cost, to set up? Not for you, for those million, billion dollar companies?)

This internet thing, is work, and no guarantees. But for free infrastructure and sophisticated launch procedures. Makes Appollo11 look like… the V2

ps Appollo 11′s onboard computer was 2 Rayethon 34K memory devices! – how did they even turn the lights on with that!