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Does your marketing pay you or just the places where you advertise? While I’ve mentioned that as a business owner, you need to be able to measure the effectiveness of your advertising, often businesses avoid this approach because of the additional work required to determine how effective an advertisement is. The truth is that it doesn’t have to be difficult at all and I’ll share some easy ways in which you can determine the effectiveness of an advertising campaign.

Why track advertising effectiveness? In one of the books that I mentioned in last month’s column, Marketing Outrageously, John Spoelstra describes the act of advertising without measurement as “throwing money into a tornado”. In this kind of a situation, even if you’re perfectly targeting your market segment, you have no way of knowing how well your message resonates with your audience. With no feedback mechanism, you never know whether you’re getting a lot of business or no business at all because of the ad.

There are numerous response mechanisms that can allow you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising. Things like coupons, rebates, loyalty programs all present a way to track advertising effectiveness. Additionally, it is relatively easy and inexpensive to create a separate phone extension, or a website landing page that will allow you to determine whether an inquiry is the result of your marketing efforts or not. You can then tally the value of the sales that result and match them up with the cost of your ads to see what each ad is bringing you in revenue.

In his book, Spoelstra explains his personal ratio for determining whether a marketing effort was effective. He sets a benchmark of 4:1 where for each dollar invested in marketing should result in at least four dollars of new revenue. He will run the same ad until his customers tell him to stop. How do they tell him to stop? They tell him to stop when the revenue ratio drops below 4:1. When the ratio drops below 4:1, he doesn’t stop advertising, he changes the advertisement.

It’s important to remember that if an ad doesn’t generate a 4:1 ratio the first time you run it, it isn’t going to “catch on”. While many advertising professionals will rightfully tell you that the public needs messages repeated numerous times in order for them to be remembered, there is an important difference when we’re advertising to increase sales (and why else would you advertise?!!!). If you don’t get the response you were expecting from the initial advertisement, it means that you didn’t strike a chord with the prospective customer and it’s time to change the message to better align with their wants, needs, and desires. Remember, we’re not selling a message, we’re selling your products and services, and your message didn’t move them to action. Rewrite the ad and try again.