When it comes to advertising, most small businesses do not have a lot of money to throw around. You want to make sure that any budget you put toward advertising is going to good use. How do you ensure that it is? Let’s talk about 3 ways to track your ad performance.
I once attended a chamber of commerce event that had a speaker from a local publication. The talk was solely a sales pitch, with the speaker informing us on how to purchase ad space and some of the more technical notes about well-performing ads. At the end of his pitch, an innkeeper raised her hand and asked, “How do we know if it’s working?” The response she got was total word salad.
Ad performance should not be a mystery to you. It is something you should be tracking closely to see what is working, what is not working, and what you want to adjust.
Ad performance should not be a mystery to you. #marketing #advertising #business #smallbusiness #smallbiz #smb #entrepreneur
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This is not something you measure once and walk away. Tools that were working a year ago could begin to trend downward for you for a number of reasons. Perhaps your audience has gone somewhere else or the platform changed its terms and conditions or pricepoint.
As business owners, we need to stay on top of where the market goes and what it responds to. This means that you should be tracking the performance of your ads!
As business owners, we need to stay on top of where the market goes and what it responds to. #marketing #advertising #smallbusiness #smallbiz #smb #business
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How do you do it? The way you track an ad varies with what platform you used for advertising, because your options change depending on the method used. Here are just 3 ways to track your ads:
Create a Unique Landing Page
For this option, you can either create a unique landing page or just a unique URL and include the link in your ad. A method like this is good for print ads. If you are advertising in newspapers, magazines, neighborhood publications, or similar print publications, you won’t have a lot of user data to track. However, if the call to action is a link – or even a phone number – that was only given to this audience, you will at least know that everyone who lands there came to you from this particular ad.
If you compare that data you have collected against the publication’s distribution numbers, you will have a sense of the percentage of interest you are getting overall.
Plant Digital Links
If you choose to advertise digitally, be thoughtful about what link you plant in your call to action. Ensure that you are calling this audience to the right next step. Then, go to your own website analytics to see exactly how many people are getting to your website from that source. In Google Analytics, you can use the Source / Medium search criteria to see what websites or pages people came from before they got to your site. You can even narrow down that information to show only the people who landed on a specific page on your website.
Your website analytics has some interesting information in store for you. To learn more about this, read here!
Ask Your Audience
For this to work best, you want to make sure you are giving your audience a way to self-identify as quickly as possible. You might have a lead magnet as an opt-in, a question form or quote form, an event for them to attend, a raffle for them to take part in. Perhaps they called you on the phone. Whatever you have, the first step is getting them into a direct conversation with you.
At the point of self-identifying, ask them the question of how they heard about you and record the results over time. The collective information you receive will tell you a lot about what is working. If you track the timing of it, you may even see trends on what works better at certain times of year and how that links up with your own marketing and advertising.
The longer you wait to collect this information, the less likely that people will remember how they heard about you to begin with. So, be sure to ask them early on in the process.
There are a number of ways to track ad performance if you plan accordingly. Don’t just let the information pass you by! If you throw money at advertising without following the data, you WILL be wasting more of it than you need to. And as a small business owner, can you afford to do that?
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