Marketing 101: Tracking Offline Campaigns
Posted on January 8th, 2009
I came across an interesting post on Darren Barefoot’s blog and I thought it would be worth sharing with the BlueFur community. By and large, readers of this blog are above average when it comes to tech-savviness, so we have a pretty good idea about things like affiliate marketing and Google AdSense.
When it comes to online marketing, there are tools available that can help you track the effectiveness of your advertising budget. If you choose to partake in a Google AdWords campaign, for example, you can know exactly how much you paid, how many impressions you received, and how many clicks went through to your website. The same can be said about running a CPA campaign through any number of affiliate networks. You have a lot of raw data at your disposal.
Offline marketing is a different matter altogether. When you buy ad space in a local newspaper, how can you know how many people actually saw the ad, how many people spent the time to read your message, and how many of these readers went on to perform the desired action (like visiting your website or buying your product). This is a much more difficult proposition, so it is important that you configure you offline marketing efforts in such a way that they can be tracked in some way.
For example, if you are going to have a sale on a particular product, the newspaper ad (or billboard, brochure, or whatever other offline media you use) should make mention of a specific coupon code for example. This way, when someone completes a purchase using that coupon code, you will know that it had to come from that specific marketing effort. You can then know how many sales were generated by your advertising campaign, computing an effective rate of return.
The data will not be quite as exact and precise as online marketing, but offline campaigns should still be tracked so that you can know if they are worth your marketing dollar.
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2 Comments
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Well I think that is as good as you are going to get offline. It is pretty much the only way I can think of that you could work it out.
If you had slightly different codes for billboards, newspaper ads, and so on, it would start to get a little more specific.
However, one would have to think of an incentive for the customer to quote the code, probably a reduction percentage or some sort of freebie. No incentive means even less likelyhood of the customer quoting the code.
Best wishes,
Ruth Stewart
Something similar works for TV ads, too. I clearly remember a few years the advertising campaign of an insurance company, which would play at any time of the day or night. Depending of the hour at which the ad would air, the phone extension provided was different. That’s an easy way to know when people saw the ad and noted the phone number!