How to Measure Your Advertising Success

The success of your advertising campaign can be very difficult to measure. After, all there is no surefire way to determine how specific advertising measures are impacting your business. On the other hand, it is essential to evaluate the effectiveness of your advertising campaign so you can determine if your advertising money is being spent wisely or if you need to make adjustments to your current advertising strategy.

Set Goals and Objectives

If you are interested in accurately measuring the effectiveness of your advertising campaign, then you need to set goals and objectives. Goals are general outcomes that you want to achieve for your business through your advertising efforts, e.g. to generate more foot traffic or to increase sales volume for store A. Objectives support the goals that you have set by outlining specific actions that you need to take, as well as by defining the measures of the success of that objective, e.g. increase sales by 10 percent through print ads or to generate 25 percent more foot traffic at store A through a special in-store drawing.

Creating a Baseline

Before you can measure the impact that your advertising campaign has had on your company, you need a baseline. This baseline is going to illustrate how your company is performing right now, before the advertising campaign is implemented. This baseline will include data related to foot traffic, website traffic, sales volumes and other related indicators of company performance.

Organizing Incoming Data

After you implement your advertising campaign, you will need to track the data sets established by the baseline study. I like to use a simple spreadsheet program to track web traffic, foot traffic and sales by day. This program can then be used to summarize the data by week, month or year. The results that are produced can be formatted into a report and used to determine if your current advertising strategies are meeting your stated objectives.

Making Changes

If your objectives are not being met, then something needs to be changed within your advertising campaign. For example, you may need to increase your print ads, or you may need to shift to new advertising sources. Before you make changes, you will want to evaluate your data to see what objective or objectives are not being met. This will help you to focus in on what needs to be changed. For example, if you web traffic objectives are being met but your foot traffic objectives are not, then you can use the success of your website to bring in new customers to your retail store. You can do this by advertising a special sale or promotion on your website that requires customers to come into the store to take advantage of it.

Sources:

"Metrics for Measuring Ad Campaign Effectiveness," Allbusiness.com.