I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “Half my advertising works, I just don’t know which half”
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: