5 Ways To Track Your Advertising ROI

Do you track your ROI (Return On Investment) on advertising? If not, then why? Simply put, if you’re not tracking your advertising ROI, you could be throwing away a good portion of your advertsing budget … and not even know it.

Tracking your advertising ROI is pretty simple with most campaigns. I don’t care if it’s a $100 campaign or a $100,000, there are ways to effectively track your investment so that you’ll know whether or not your spending your hard earned money wisely.

For starters, here’s a few simple ways most Small Businesses can track their advertising ROI.

1. Use Special Codes in Coupons: If you do a lot of print advertising, such as Newspapers or Phone Books, you can insert a code into a coupon. Then when a Customer brings in the coupon, you keep it and enter it into a database or just keep up with it somehow. This is also a great technique to try different coupons to see which one is more effective.
2. Use Specific Phone Numbers For Specific Offers: If you’re advertising is such that Customers must call you to place an order or ask for more information, using a specific phone # will allow you to track how well that particular ad is paying you back. This can also be accomplished by using the method above, inserting a special code into the ad or coupon. Just make sure you word it so they must tell you the Code before receiving the benefits of the Coupon.
3. Use Specific Email and Contact Forms. Setting up email accounts with any of the Big 3 Search Engines is a breeze. If you’re running an online promotion, and the Customer must respond by email, then set the Contact Form so that it will send the Customers information (when the enter it and then hit ‘Submit’) to a specific email account set up specially for that offer. This way you’ll be able to guage your online response.
4. Use Landing Pages: How effective your online advertising is can be tracked by using different landing pages. Landing pages are specific pages that a Customer lands on after clicking an ad or offer of yours. These pages should be set up with some type of analytic software that will monitor each page and tell you how many visitors you had, where they came from, where they exited, how long the spent on the page and what they clicked on when they left. A coupld good places to get web based analytics is StatCounter and Google Analytics. Both are free and all you do is install some bits of Code by cutting and pasting it into your website. It’s really simple and you’ll gain a ton of information about your Customers.
5. Use An Email Service: If your staying in touch with your Customers with a list you’ve built, then whenever you send them an email you should be able to tell how many opened it, how many click on the links in it and how many trashed it. The easiest way to do this is to use a service like Constant Content, AWeber or Listraks. Whenever they send an email to all your Customers through their service, it will return a ton information about that email and your Customers. You can then use this information to further tweak your upcoming emails to draw an ever larger response.

Tracking your ROI on advertising doesn’t have to be Rocket Science. These few tips will help you see whether or not you’re wasting money on your advertising. There’s no time to get started like the present!