Tracking Results

Anything measured improves. The human brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe, and you have one of these amazingly powerful pattern-matching, goal-seeking devices all of your own.

The very fact you’re looking at the results of what you’re doing will automatically get your brain looking for ways to improve it.

Besides, if there’s anything in your marketing mix you can’t measure, then you should stop doing it until you can measure it – because if you can’t measure it you can’t know if it’s making you any money, and marketing not making money is the most expensive marketing you will ever do.

And an essential component of any form of marketing is the ability to track responses – and TV advertising is no different.

It’s absolutely essential you can track the specific ad which led to every sale.

Why?

Because TV advertising sales people and their buddies the production people and video crew are not marketing people. They don’t know what makes an ad effective.

We get a similar story with direct mail, too: most Entrepreneurs tell me direct mail doesn’t work. But it does. All they’ve discovered is it doesn’t work for them when they do it the wrong way.

So if you’re doing TV advertising and can’t tell beyond all doubt it’s making you money, then stop doing it now! You must be ruthless about this: if someone responds to an ad they’ve seen on the TV, you must be able to track it.

It’s not enough to say “I ran an ad on the TV and seemed to be busier the next week”. It has to be traceable down to the individual sale.

This means perhaps having a dedicated phone number you use only on one ad so you know all calls coming in on that number can only have come from that ad; and it means using the latest technology on your website to track visitors (or send them to a one-off Internet domain – nowadays a .co.uk domain is about £6 to register, and you can get unlimited hosting for 3 years for less than £250 from places like bluehost.com).

Remember, the way to make money with advertising is by maximising your ROI, and the easiest way to do that is to maximise response; and one way of maximising response is to find out which ads are getting the biggest response and run more of them – and cut out the ones with the poorest response.

Here are some really simple ways of you can track responses to your TYV advertising:

• Unique URL for every ad
• Unique telephone number for every ad
• A unique “coupon code” for the caller to use either on a website or on a phone call
• A unique email address for the ad
• A unique SMS number for the ad