Can you measure the effectiveness of advertising? Yes?

Advertising pioneer John Wanamaker once famously said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.

In a recent project we set up 10 different styles of landing page for a client in the insurance industry. Each page had exactly the same content. The conversion rates for the same page ranged from 10% – 70% depending on where we put the navigational elements on the page. In the old days without advanced web analytic software you would not have known which page people preferred. You could have run a focus group. People would have told you how they thought they would have reacted but that is very different to looking at statistics to see how people actually did react. This also then ties directly back to sales.

There are still factors which make measuring return on investment very hard. One such factor would be the quality of the customer. This may become apparent only in the very long term. You might be attracting customers that only ever buy from you one time. You might be attracting customers that buy from you for 100s of years. All advertising is at its most basic level a conversation with the customer. It takes a long time to build trust and that is the part that is harder to measure. It is however getting easier.

Social media monitoring is a very good way of finding out how people really feel about your brand or product. If you can read what people are saying about you online it helps a lot in understanding your brand or product. Many of the conversations that took place offline now take place online. They would not have been heard by the marketing departments of the companies they involve. With effective social media monitoring these conversations can teach companies a massive amount about themselves. This information can be fed into not just marketing but also into the buyers and product developers in your organisation.

Today you can measure your campaigns more precisely than ever before. You need to know which campaigns are making you money and which ones are losing you money. The right agency will be able to tell you the answer to that.