Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

Measuring advertising effectiveness is one of the key components to having a successful marketing campaign. If you are concerned about whether your marketing return on investment is worthwhile or if you’re spending a lot on marketing without seeing results, knowing how to track and measure the performance of your activities will not only make you more efficient but also stretch your advertising dollars as far as possible.

Below are some ways for measuring your advertising and marketing effectiveness:

1. Website Stats: If you don’t have a website stat counter yet, you certainly need to have one. Not knowing how many visitors you get each day or where they come from will not help you see which online tactics are working, or if others have found you through offline promotion either. At the very least you should be aware of what keywords are bringing traffic to your site, how many are coming directly by typing in your domain name, and other referring pages. More detailed info such as bounce rates, visitor paths, landing and exit pages will all give you additional information to assess what marketing value your website is providing.

2. Asking People How They Found Out About You: If you get a cold call and don’t know where the person came from, there’s no harm in asking how they found out about the property they are calling on or why they called you. Was it the sign in the yard? The ad you placed in the paper? Craigslist? Most people won’t reckon it’s weird if you question them how they found out about the property or your services.

3. Comparing Time With Promotion: Some promotions will bring immediate results, others might take months before you see results. For example, if you are consistently sending out postcards to a targeted neighborhood, you likely won’t get calls the first month or two. But, after 6 months you might start seeing calls. Make sure before judging that a campaign has been a failure that you’ve allotted enough time to assess it’s effectiveness and give it time to perform.

4. Stop Running Ads: If you’ve been regularly advertising in the newspaper every week for years for example, try a few weeks of going without the advertising. If you don’t see any difference in calls or business, there’s a excellent chance you won’t miss it and can cut it out unless your seller demands it for their listings. You can also do this with CPC campaigns – if you stop running it and notice you get less emails from your website contact form, you may choose it’s best to keep that one going. Always test this way one ad at a time – you don’t want to reckon it’s the newspaper advertising that was working when it was really the CPC advertising.

5. Use Different Phone Numbers: You can often track an ad’s performance by using different contact phone numbers. If you get calls to a number that’s only listed in one advertisement, then you can be pretty certain that ad was successful.

6. Use Direct Response Postcards: Postcards that can offer a simple pre-paid “drop in the mail for more info” type of response can help you gauge the effectiveness of a direct mail campaign. This works well with an offer to do a free home consultation or to provide the customer with more information about recent news, events, or special promotion.

While there is no exact science to understanding how your marketing efforts are paying off and what response and return on investment they are bringing, doing just a few of these will help you choose if what you are doing is working and should be continued, if you should try something else, or if there are other ways to improve your marketing campaigns. Taking the time to analyze the effectiveness of a campaign will not only help you spend less time preparing ads that don’t work – but also save you money as well.

What do you do for measuring advertising effectiveness? Share your thoughts in the comments below.