How to know if your advertising is working for your business?

Do you understand how your advertising is impacting your business?

Do you know how to examine Google Analytics to see if your campaign goals are being achieved?

If this all seems like a great, big mystery…you’re not alone.

Advertising isn’t a perfect science, but at Intrigue, we have developed, tested, and proven advertising strategies to boost your advertising engagement and save you money.

Effective advertising isn’t easy. If it were, we’d be out of a job!

There a number of different ways to tell if your advertising is working for your businesses. The first is to examine your subjective data:

Subjective Advertising Data

Determining if your marketing is working based on subjective data means that you think, believe, or have a gut feeling that it’s working.

Examples of subjective data include:

• Your store/facility/location seems busier than normal  
• Your phone is ringing more often
• Your clients are providing positive feedback
• Your sales are increasing
• Your online website page visits, clicks, and views are going up

While it’s possible to run an advertising campaign using only subjective data to determine if it’s effective, it is not advised. Without objective data, you may never know why or what is specifically working — this is why it is vital to also examine objective data.

Objective Data

Objective data will help you concretely determine if your advertising is working based on facts.

Examples of objective data include:

Creating unique URLs or domains

Let’s say you are running an awareness campaign in the newspaper. If you were to place a unique URL (yourwebsite.ca/unique) in the print ad and examine the amount of web traffic your new URL received, then you would be able to start to determine the effectiveness of your campaign. If you have the page hidden from Google and not featured in your main menu then you will know that the visits to that page came solely from your print ad.   

Creating a unique phone number

A similar option is to use a new phone number to measure the number of times your phone rings related to a specific advertising campaign. There are tools you can use for this tracking, like CallRail, that will switch out the number on your site depending on which source customers come from (e.g. Google Adwords traffic sees one phone number, and Facebook Advertising traffic sees a different phone number). The new number doesn’t override your existing number, it just creates a new number for the campaign.

Setting up Google Analytics Goals

Setting up analytics and creating goals is one of the best way to determine if your advertising is working for your business. There are many ways to set up goals, and if done correctly, you can determine which acquisition source is bringing you the most inquiries both through your website and via phone calls. For example, you can determine how many online forms were filled in and how many phone calls were received from Facebook ads versus an email marketing campaign.

*A screenshot  from intrigueme.ca’s Google Analytics Account displaying an overview of Goal 2: Thank You Pageview

If you have any questions about how to track your advertising dollars, or you would like to know more about which marketing efforts will give you the greatest return on your investment, give us a shout, we’d love to start the conversation.

When Matt isn’t working or helping out in the community you can find him doing just about anything to stay moving. A lover of all sports and a master of none, Matt enjoys staying active and a little healthy competition. Look for Matt at a community event near you and isn’t ashamed to admit that he will likely be drinking a Bud Lite!