* Is there a product that can be dropped that would increase sales on others by bringing a sharper focus?

While above are clear cut, it's very difficult to measure effectiveness of any change. That is, given a change, 100 hits on a sales presentation may yield 3 sales rather than 2, but you still must do a lot of guessing. In fact, a good improvement in presentation may result in a drop to only 1 sale in next 100 hits. With so few hits, results are not conclusive. If you are convinced your new page is better, you may decide to keep it, and worry about CR over time.

How Many Hits Can You Expect?

When a new site is opened, only hits come from webmaster and friends. While building content, submitting to search engines, improving sales presentations and all else that is required to grow a site, you will be busy. Hit counts will climb, but slowly. Sales even more slowly.

While there are those who have experience to generate massive hit counts in very short order, even most determined newbie may need to be content with something between 2000 and 4000 total hits in first year. Translate this to only a few sales of a $20 ebook, and it's easy to see why people so often do not hold on even for a year.

The good news for persistent types is that a growth rate of ten percent per month is not out of reach. And this brings a doubling in 7.5 months. The secret? Hang in and make it happen!

It Takes A Lot Of Hits

Until you are generating two to three hundred hits a day, testing is not likely to "prove" effectiveness (or failure) of changes. In fact, even at 1000 hits per day, there will always be a need to evaluate results. In some cases, you must ignore what numbers appear to say.

To put this another way, suppose you are up to 1000 hits per day. If you put up a new sales presentation and your CR jumps from 2% to 4%, and stays there, there's really no choice. Hold to new version. However, you may decide to do so even if CR drops a tad. Why? Because results from even 1000 hits day can be circumstantial, a function of traffic that happened by. The new page may be determined good, so long as there is not a significant drop. In taking this choice, hope is in gains over time.

Where Does That Leave You?

In end, it is always a matter of judgement. With few hits, this is really all there is to go by. Given lots of hits, you will have better numbers to help you make such judgements. But you will also have greater experience. So now, as at some future date, you may need to act upon your sense of things, rather than numbers.