Are You Measuring Your Marketing?

When it comes to online marketing, so many businesses use the old technique of throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it’s cooked. They don’t really measure any advertising they do. They just throw some money here, some money there, and see what works. Why not just head to Vegas and put some money down at the craps table? Because if you don’t measure your marketing return on investment (ROI), you really are gambling with the success of your business.

In today’s incredibly connected world, businesses have a ton (technical term) of ways to track advertising spending. It’s just silly (again, technical term) to not invest a small amount to help track what you spend on your business. Here are just a few examples of how you can track your advertising investments.

• Unique URLs – Running an ad in a local magazine? Create a special URL for the ad so you can track how many people came in from it. Your web vendor can easily set this up for you. For example – www.mysite.com/printad
• Trackable Phone Numbers – For a very small fee, you can get unique, trackable phone numbers for every ad you run, your website, radio. They will forward to any number you want and even have the ability to record calls so you can use them for training purposes with your staff.
• Referral Code – Any time you list your domain on any site other than yours, for instance on some online directory, you should be giving them a unique code to use so you can track traffic coming in from that site. For instance, if I ran Google PPC ads, I would do www.mysite.com/?utm_source=googleppc. Google has a great tool to build trackable URLs.
• Google Analytics – If you don’t have Google Analytics or some other stats program collecting data on your visitors you are really doing yourself a disservice. There is no better way to track what people coming onto your site are looking at as well as where they came from and what they typed in to find you. Make sure your SEO team is not just spitting out your monthly visitation and calling it “metrics.” Your team has to perform in-depth analysis of your Analytics and suggest tactics based on the reported metrics.

While measuring your marketing may feel overwhelming, it actually takes very little time for your web marketing vendor to help with all of these tactics. Do yourself and your pocketbook a favor and spend a little more to track your advertising investments.

 

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