Your task list is ever expanding.

You spend your days and a good part of your nights working on, thinking about, and reading about ways to make your online business better. You would fall asleep except that you know when you close your eyes at night you think of all of tasks you didn't complete today, and the tasks that you will have to complete tomorrow. Instead, with tired eyes and a clenched jaw you take another sip of your lukewarm coffee and begin working on one of your ten to-do lists. Do you send out an email or do you work on the social media? This is your business so you decide to do both. It will be another night where you stay up until 2 AM. It seems like no matter what action you take it doesn't matter, you bottom line has moved very little. Your site looks good, you are offering a great product, and you must have re-written the copy 1,000 times. Yet, no one goes to your site and the visitors that do make it to the site don't convert. You are frustrated, tired, and unsure of why this is happening.

This is your online marketing and you are being extremely inefficient.

YOU CHOOSE TASKS BASED ON BEST PRACTICE, INTUITION AND EGO – THIS IS INEFFICIENT

You are getting all of your tasks completed but they are not moving the needle and this is an extremely inefficient way to market online.  Sometimes you may be working on tasks based on best practices. More than likely you have read some books, watched some webinars, and consulted with so-called online marketing experts. They know what worked for their customers, but what worked for their past customers does not necessarily work for yours. In fact, the best practices they teach you that worked for their customers may be detrimental to yours. Here is one of my favorite blogs about why best practices are dead and you will see how blindly following best practices makes your site a lemming!

Other times you may be choosing your tasks based on intuition. You think that your customers will like how this page looks, and you are pretty sure that you are being clear about the value of what you are trying to offer. However, this is also inefficient – just because you think you know something doesn't make it a fact. If it did you would have sales and not have wasted time creating an email that was unread and unopened.

Worst of all is when you choose tasks that are ego driven. How much time did you spend creating your logo that you could show your friends? Why is your page about you rather than the value that you provide to your customers? If you are choosing your tasks based on best practice, intuition and ego it will not matter how many tasks you complete – you will be simply spinning your wheels and are an inefficient marketer.

YOU ARE NOT CHOOSING TASKS BASED ON CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

You choose tasks based on intuition, best practice, and ego because you are thinking about it from the wrong angle. There is only one group of people that you should care about – your customers. This should be pretty obvious, but for some reason online businesses don't always get this – your customers make or break your business. So if you choose to spend your time focusing all of your time and effort on creating a logo and your customers don't care at all about your logo then no matter how quickly you finished the task it is by definition inefficient. By initially focusing on tasks that where you receive real world customer feedback and then putting that feedback into your business you will run an extremely efficient and highly profitable online business.

GET REAL WORLD FEEDBACK

The way to find out what your customers actually care about is to get real world feedback. You want to see what your customers do and do not respond to and then make the choices of what tasks you will perform from that information. By this I mean you do not want to simply ask them, what you want to do is test in a real world environment what works and what does not work. There is often a large gap between what a customer says they will buy and what they actually do buy. The best way to close that gap is to….

A/B TEST TO FIND WHAT THE CUSTOMER ACTUALLY RESPONDS TO AND THEN USE THAT KNOWLEDGE EFFICIENTLY

You can do this through email, SEO (using a tool like visual website optimizer), pay per click, social media and more. However for my money and time the most efficient way that I have found to A/B test is through pay per click. The reason I use this channel so often is:

• The consistent stream of traffic, 
• The level of control you have over all aspects of the test, 
• The way you can choose what is counted as a conversion. 

With pay per click I can specify that I want users from a certain geographic area, who type in a certain word, to go to a certain page. This traffic is virtually unlimited as long as your budget doesn't run out and it is much cheaper and more targeted than radio or television.  The method I describe provides real world feedback, because you put the different variables in front of the audience and see what they what actually makes them convert rather than what they simply say would make them convert.

HOW TO A/B TEST IN ADWORDS TO FIND WHAT MAKES YOUR CUSTOMERS CONVERT

1. Decide What Variable You Want To Test

When you want to increase the efficiency of your business you need to figure out what is preventing the sales from happening and you need to do this quickly. More often than not it is your value proposition that is lacking. Value proposition is the perceived benefits a customer sees vs. the perceived costs for them to get your product or service. I recommend testing value proposition first as it often has the biggest impact. For more information about value proposition check out these articles:

a. Marketing Experiments – This is very thorough and they also have a course on value proposition.
b. KissMetrics – This blog contains some great examples. I personally think that visual website optimizer has one of the best value propositions and they show the example prominently on this blog.

Other high impact variables you could test include your call to action button, your features and benefits list, and the actual design of your site.

2. Define Your Conversion Metric

You need to know what it is your want your visitor to do on the page. Is it sign up for an email list, make a purchase, request a quote? This is a business decision, but you do need to have an action that you want your customer to complete. These business actions are called conversions.

3. Setup AdWords

For illustrative purposes I am going to assume you chose to test your value proposition, though the steps work no matter what you are testing.

a. Go to AdWords and create one campaign with one AdGroup and I would even recommend one keyword.

b. Choose the keyword that best represents exactly what you sell. Put that keyword in exact or phrase match so that it most closely matches the search query with the keyword.

c. In this AdGroup create two different ads where the only difference is the value proposition.  Each ad will send a user to a different landing page. For example value proposition “A” will be in one ad and one landing page and value proposition “B” will be in the other ad and landing page. I use UnBounce for my landing pages – I have no stake in the company I just think they make the process easy to use and the support is great. Make sure the ads are set to rotate evenly.

d. Setup conversion tracking – Make sure that whatever your goal for the customer to complete is being tracked. For eCommerce this is a sale and lead generation this is a lead.

4. Run The Test To A 95% Confidence Interval

Many of the landing page tools such as UnBounce calculate this automatically for you. The only thing you are testing for is conversions. Do not focus on the click through rate, the cost per click, etc. You want to know what business action your customer responds to. Once you have found the winner…

5. Get Efficient

Now that you know what your customer actually responds to it is time to take on tasks actually move the needle. You are now performing efficient marketing because you know that all the tasks you are completing from here on out are based on actual customer feedback. Here are some ideas:

a. Create a couple of blogs, a webinar, and even an email drip campaign talking about the specific value proposition and some of the inherent problems and obstacles relating to it.

b. Create new offers based on the information you received.

c. Create an infographic relating to that value proposition.

d. Put that value proposition in other marketing materials and see if it moves the needle.

What are your tips for being an efficient Internet marketer?

Author Bio
Adam Lundquist (@adamlundquist) is the CEO of Nerds Do It Better a Philadelphia based digital marketing company. He was Santa Barbara's #1 Morning Show Host, an Army veteran, and recently a Harvard graduate. Adam cuts through the marketing noise to create digital marketing campaigns with clear business oriented goals and objectives. He has been featured in The Harvard Gazette, Mtv, Vh1, Sports Illustrated, and Moz.