Measure Your Marketing ROI: One Simple Method

How much are you spending on your marketing efforts? Is it generating more revenue than you are paying?

It always surprises me how much money companies spend without a clear ROI from their marketing efforts. This is one of the reasons I focus on internet marketing. One of its strengths is its ability to clearly track someone from their first impression to their final purchase.

Traditional marketing has a hard time coming up with exact numbers when it comes to ROI. This is particularly difficult when you consider how expensive some forms of traditional marketing can be, from television ads to Yellow Page listings. You could drop a chunk of cash on channels like these and never know for sure if it ever leads to another sale.

There is a simple solution to this problem. You can use the power of internet marketing to track your marketing ROI for offline marketing efforts. It’s straightforward. All you need is the ability to create a brand new landing page on your website and any web analytics package to track your offline efforts by sending people to that page.

It just needs to be an orphaned, virgin page. I know that sounds sad, but it is a good thing.

You need an orphaned webpage. Your new landing page cannot be accessible from any website page- you have to know the URL to view the page. This kind of page is essential because if someone reached it, you know the only way they found it was from your offline efforts.  If your page is not orphaned (and can be reached by navigating through your website), then you’ll not know exactly how they came to your site, and you won’t have precise data to show you the effect of your offline marketing efforts.

You need a virgin webpage. You’ll need a new URL for each channel to distinguish people coming from different events or different marketing efforts. If you use the same URL in your radio ad that you use in your TV ad, you’ll never be able to distinguish the ROI between each channel. Once you’ve used a URL, it has to remain dedicated to that specific channel.

Example: How to Track ROI from a Radio Ad

Let’s say you’re going to be producing a radio ad. You could send visitors to your website as a call-to-action from the ad. If you do that, you won’t be able to distinguish between the benefits of your radio ads and the number of people coming to your website because a friend recommended you. Sure, you might see an increase in direct or branded search visitors, but you’ll never be able to distinguish your radio ad’s ROI clearly. However, if you send them to yourwebsite.com/radio, you know that the people visiting that page are from the radio ad. If you can set up a call-to-action on that page and measure how many of those visitors convert into leads or sales, you’ll be able to measure the ROI of your radio ad.

As people encounter your unique URL, they will (hopefully) remember it. This might lead to cloudy data as this URL becomes shared online. Someone may be impressed by your AC check-up special and share it on their Facebook page. They might share the TV tracking URL if they’ve seen your TV ad. That means your TV data is clouded with Facebook data.

Maybe that’s technically true, but in this case, the fact that someone remembered your TV ad and shared that URL on their Facebook page shows how effective your TV ad was, after all. It seems fair to attribute that Facebook share to the effectiveness of your TV ad and use that calculation in the ROI for your marketing efforts.