I was flipping through one of Brisbane’s free publications, MAP Magazine, and noticed with some surprise that only one of the 67 paid ads was definitely using a basic, accurate and potentially cost-free method of tracking its success.

I don’t know about you, but if I were to spend money on advertising (or any promotional campaign – including flyer distribution and radio spots) I’d want to know if it’s working or not.  Not only that but I’d want some definite numbers so that I can compare various different marketing efforts to determine which are working better than others.

To my eye, in this particular issue of MAP Magazine, there were:

• 17 paid ads with no website link at all
• 50 paid ads with a website link
• over 81 editorial links
• 2 Bigpond email addresses (instead of professional looking myname@companyname.com addresses)
• 1 paid ad with a website link with “Coming soon” written next to it
• 1 paid ad with a link to a MySpace profile (*rolls eyes*)
• 1 paid ad that clearly had a method for tracking the ad’s success
• 2 paid ads that might have been trackable

Imagine that you manage a shop in the Valley that sells sunglasses and you run, within the space of a few months, an advertisement in five different publications and you do flyer distribution in three different localities.

You include your phone number and physical address in the ads and flyers.  You also have the presence of mind to instruct your shop staff to [casually] survey callers and visitors as to how they came by your shop (and have some incentive to ensure they don’t forget!).

You’ve also included your website address on all five advertisements and flyers.  Let’s say it’s www.mysunglassesshop.com.

During those months you see an improvement in traffic coming to your site but you have no idea which ads or flyers are bringing you the traffic.  What a bummer!

This is what you can do next time:

Each time you run an advertisement or promotion, change the link a little.  If you were promoting a 10% discount in MAP Magazine, for example, you might publish your website address as: www.mysunglassesshop.com/mapoffer.  At the same time you could do a flyer distribution in West End and promote the link www.mysunglassesshop.com/westendoffer.

Each of those links would take the prospective customer to a highly targetted webpage specifically tailored for MAP readers and West End residents, respectively.  This not only allows you to track web traffic from each of your marketing efforts but it ALSO makes for a more compelling sales experience.

By the way, you can also do this with domain names – for example, www.SunGlassesForMapReaders.com

Incidentally, all Webnerd clients for whom we’ve implemented a content management system and web statistics already have all the tools they need to run trackable offline promotions without spending another cent on web development or maintenance.

Wishing you happiness and success in your online and offline endeavours!