There is a great article over at The Moz Blog on How to Track the Online ROI of Offline Advertising. Geoff Kenyon mentions some effective measurement tactics, including unique URLs and setting up redirects and campaign parameters in Google Analytics. These tactics are actually extremely helpful for measuring the ROI of online advertising as well. I would add a few more tactics, that can be useful for the measurement of ROI in both offline and online advertising…
Set Specific Goals
One of the biggest problems that many advertising (and marketing) campaigns have is the lack of a clear goal. Obviously we advertise in order to increase sales (or awareness), but how much do you expect the tactic to increase sales or awareness? ROI (return on investment) is about an increase in hard cash as compared to the cost of the campaign. Having a clear and specific goal will not only help you set expectations, it will help you set up the right measurements to know if you’ve achieved the goal and made a return on the campaign.
Understand Your Conversions
Once you have a goal in mind, it becomes easier to understand what you want people to do on your website or landing page. The conversions are intimately tied to the goal. If you’re trying to increase awareness, you could ask people to share your message for a chance to win a prize, while measuring not only the traffic to the page, but also the number of shares, and wider mentions. To tie awareness to sales, you often have to look for a more indirect “uplift” in sales, unless you’re advertising a specific sales incentive.
Be Specific in Your Call to Action
Keeping in mind your goal and conversions, make sure calls to action in your advertising specifically ask the audience to do what you need them to do. Having a catchy tagline for your product or service is great, but you need to make sure you ask people to take the next step and spell out specifically what that next step is: “Visit www.ourawesomewebsite.com/thiscampaign to share your story for a chance to win a new ourawesomeproduct!”. Not only do people know what to do next, they understand the expectations of what they need to do so there are no surprises, which makes people feel better about going to a website.
Tie Your Landing Page to Your Action
This is pretty obvious, but you should always send people to a landing page that is dedicated to your specific campaign and offer. The homepage of your site is the worst place possible because not only does it make it more difficult to track the effectiveness of your advertising, it makes it hard for visitors to know what to do next, which will lead to poor conversions and return on investment.
Planning Leads to Effective Measurement
Taking a few minutes to understand these tactics and drawing out the steps you want a person to take throughout your campaign will help you setup an effective measurement strategy for your advertising. Being able to effectively measure your campaigns will help you understand, not only the return on investment, but also what works and what doesn’t, as well as how you can improve your efforts.
