Measuring Advertising Results

Start by understanding what advertising is really good at:

• Building awareness or recognition - Telling prospects about your company or brand.
• Enhancing perception and preference - Creating strong, positive impressions of a company or brand.
• Generating inquiries - Getting a response that can lead to a sale. 

And usually advertising reaches a broad audience.

The first two of the bulleted points are important, but don't count for much in today's bottom-line oriented business world.  Awareness, perception and preference can be measured, but right now it's inquiries your president and CFO care about.

Inquiry quantity is fairly easy to count.  Here are some techniques to think about:

1. Have your phone answers ask and keep track - Many inquiries come in by phone.  It's low tech but very effective to have those answering the phones simply ask how the caller heard about the company.  Tallies can be kept by a computer program or on paper.
2.  Set up a special phone number - Most phone systems will count the number of calls coming in to a given number.  If you use a special  phone number in your ad, you can get a raw count.
3. Set up a special landing page online - Since many people prefer to go online first, your ad can feature a special web address, and you'll get a count of online response.

Inquiry quality is the biggest issue, though.   Your company leadership will want to know "Did they buy?"  "How much did they buy?" and "What's the return on our investment in advertising?"  You may need to do some calculating to answer.  Here are ideas:

1. DIRECT MEASUREMENT:  Use an internal system that tracks inquiries and sales.  Because this method requires consistent compliance from the sales force, it works best in situations where the sales force is small.
2. INDIRECT MEASUREMENT:  Extrapolate value of inquiries.  First, qualify your inquiries.  Then multiply the number of qualified inquiries by the average value per sale.  In the B2B world a qualified inquiry is one that has specifying/buying authority and is going to buy in 6 months or less.  Make these part of your tracking system.