Tracking Marketing Results

The New Year has arrived, and with it come new opportunities to achieve greatness with your marketing strategies. You likely will be allocating substantial dollars toward marketing and advertising this year. Do you know how to use those dollars to generate the best results for your company? If you didn’t track your marketing performance in 2007, it may be difficult to know where and how to market in 2008. 

Tracking the results of your marketing strategies is an essential -- yet often overlooked -- aspect of your campaign. Embarking on a marketing plan without putting tracking mechanisms in place is like exploring uncharted territory without marking the path by which you travel. When it’s all said and done, it might be difficult to determine which steps helped you reach your destination and which just got you lost.

Measuring performance is the best way to make sure subsequent campaigns are effective in reaching customers and generating a substantial return on your investment. Let’s face it, you probably don’t have unlimited dollars for advertising. You need to maximize your resources by directing them into marketing strategies that are proven performers. The knowledge of what works comes easier when you track results.

Tracking can be done through various approaches, such as phone interviews, questionnaires and placing tracking codes in ads. Some techniques, such as tracking codes, are considered direct tracking. Other techniques, such as documenting sales after placing a new ad, are indirect. Tracking can be a continuous ongoing strategy, or it can be done in periodic waves every few months or so. 

Important aspects of your marketing efforts that should be tracked include:

1. The creation of brand awareness among target groups. This is ensuring that your audience knows about your product or service and can recall some of the key aspects of your organization.
2. The correlation between brand awareness and advertising awareness. If brand awareness is rising along with advertising awareness, it is reasonable to assume that brand awareness is largely generated by advertising.
3. Advertising message recall. When asked about a specific advertisement, consumers should be able to recall the message being sent. If the message is not getting through or is not easily recalled, you need to tweak your presentation. You’ll also need to determine whether the problem is in the message or the method of delivery
4. Brand usage. This information is especially useful when results are cross-referenced between users and non-users of the brand. Knowing whether a consumer was a user of the product or service prior to the advertising messages may help determine if advertising has a prominent impact on potential buyers. 
5. Demographics. The average demographics of the audience (i.e. age, sex, socio-economic status, and location) are vital for tracking. In order to define your target market and differentiate the response from distinct audiences to specific strategies, you have to be able to identify the demographics of who is getting – or should be getting – your message.

 When you understand the basic motivation behind your advertising results, you will have the information you need to improve your message and redefine your target for better results.

The Internet has opened up a new world of marketing opportunities, and offers solid tools to quantify results. Online tools can measure the number of click-throughs to your website, determine where your site links are posted, and decipher which browsers and operating systems your visitors use.   

Online resources for tracking include sites such as LinkCounter, HyperTracker and Adminder. In addition to recording the number of click-throughs to your website, these tools offer comparisons of advertising method results and calculate cost-per-click and click-to-sale ratios for each ad. LinkCounter and other similar tools can be downloaded for free, but paying for these services could yield more complete information.

You can also track how many people view your online ads by adding a question mark followed by a specific ad name to your URL, which looks something like: www.yourdomain?ad1. This will still open your web page and will allow you to track the results of a specific ad in your log files.

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