Measuring Results

Some clients come to us and complain that they really don’t like how the marketing of their company seems to be a game of chance. They are “throwing” money at marketing, but they don’t know what impact it is having on their bottom line.

There is good news and bad news about measurement in marketing. First, the bad news. Sometimes, you will not get perfect information. If you are using a medium such as radio to increase brand awareness (i.e. you are not making a special offer to promote a quick sell but rather trying to get people to know about your company), there will inevitably be a good chunk of that budget that will yield intangible benefits only some time down the road.

What that means is that if you have been playing radio spots for the last three months talking about your company, ABC windows, and not offering a very specific promotion, it may be difficult to track the exact value that you are getting out of your spots. The goal of that campaign is not to create direct traffic for your company but rather to give your company an advantage when the listener does need a window company and searches for companies to use online.

So that is the bad news – in some cases, it can be difficult to get an exact reading on the effectiveness of your campaign. Now, for the good news. The good news is that most of your campaign dollars can be tracked very effectively through the use of dedicated numbers, unique landing pages or unique promotional offers.

With redirecting numbers being as inexpensive as they are today, we urge our clients to use a different number for each initiative to understand how their campaigns are performing. The beauty of these numbers is that they offer statistics on call volume, distribution, length and even offer the option of recording the calls for quality assurance purposes. If we can invest in marketing, we should be able to invest a fraction of that cost into measuring tools.

Unique landing pages and promotional offers is another way in which you can gauge the results of your campaigns. If your campaign is designed to increase traffic to your site, create a specific landing page and track those results through Google Analytics. If you are doing a pay-per-click campaign and want to test how effective it is at generating new business, create a unique offer that is only visible to people that fall onto your site as a result of your pay per click campaign.

Ultimately, the lesson here is don’t spend time only on the development of your marketing initiatives. Make sure that you spend some time on figuring out if your efforts are paying off.