How Can You Measure the Success of Your Ad in Advertising?

What yard sticks you can use to measure the success of your ad? Here are some things to keep on notice:

Customer feedback:

Not everyone can use direct response advertising, of course. For other advertisers the measurement techniques are neither as simple nor as accurate.

One technique, used extensively by industries where the first contact is by phone (such as double glazing, loft conversion and other household improvement industries, where clients usually phone for an estimate) is to get feedback from the customer. The phone operator who first takes the call simply asks customers where they first heard of the company. But it can also be used when the first contact is face to face; or, indeed, the customer can be asked to fill in a questionnaire.

This enables you to measure how many of your customers responded to each of a wide variety of advertisements and media, as well as to word-of-mouth publicity. It is not quite as accurate as direct response, especially if you use a number of different ads and media, because many people will have responded to an overall image of your company derived from a number of sources, and will be unable to identify one in particular.

Market research:

Research into the public's response to certain ads or images on a national scale is very expensive, and not to be recommended unless you have the money to do it properly. But if your market is local, it might be worth employing a market research organization to conduct a survey for you (like 'Market research and analysis' in the Yellow Pages). If they combine your survey with others they are doing, the costs will be much lower than if you ask them to carry out a survey just for you.

Market researchers canvass a cross-section of the public, either by telephone or in the street, and you would have to discuss exactly what you wanted them to find out for you. As with customer feedback, the results will not be as accurate a measure of an individual ad's success as a cost per inquiry calculation in direct response advertising.

Measuring sales:

You should, in the normal course of your business, be measuring sales through the year. These sales can be related to advertising effort, as well as other factors, to try to discover its effect on the business.

It is rarely as clear-cut as that, however. The most you can usually hope for is to see the effect of a whole campaign in your sales figures, rather than being able to measure the success of individual ads.

If the purpose of your campaign was to create a particular image, then this is a good way of assessing it. Market research might tell you whether people responded positively or negatively to the campaign, but only your sales figures can tell you whether the response was positive enough to make people buy the product. You need to measure your sales over a long period, say three to six months, and compare them with the same period in previous years to see how successful your image is.