If you’re not tracking the results of your marketing, you’re not really marketing, you’re just throwing your money down into a wishing well and hoping that someone at the bottom throws even more money back up at you. But, we all know how hard it is to throw a dollar bill up a wishing well, don’t we?
When you’re spending your marketing dollars online, tracking is relatively easy. You’ve got logs and stats and if you use something like Google Adwords and Google Analytics, you’re able to see great big charts of the number of times your advertisement has been shown, how often it was clicked, and if you’ve configured everything correctly how often someone has ended up on your “Thank you for your sale” page buying something on your website.
But, if you are marketing offline, tracking is an entirely different story. If your phone rings, you can always ask the person on the other end how they heard about you. If they come into your store, you can do the same thing. But, what if you trying to drive traffic to a website? How do you know how many people went to the website just because they were going to, and how many went there directly related to their seeing your ad?
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Take the advice of direct response television advertising industry try the following:
So how do we segregate the results of each advertisement in a way that can be used for comparative data? It’s really simple: use designated domains. Using the log files, the designated domains can help you track the visitors of your website. Make sure that you assign a respective landing page to each of the designated domains in order to funnel each piece of information correctly. To understand how this works, I’ll show you how it looks like. As an example, let’s assume that the business has something to do with slot cars.
- Direct Mail Text 1 – Tracking Domain – TheGreatSlotCars.com
- Ad 1 – Tracking Domain – VisitYourGreatSlotCars.com
- Ad 2 – Tracking Domain – YourGreatSlotCarsOnline.com
If you notice, each advert leads to a unique URL. Once you’ve gathered all the results, you’d be able to determine which advertisement enticed the most people and which one produced the least.
