How to Track Marketing ROI

Write it down… We are believers. Believers in the tracking of marketing ROI. Whether it be your primary website, your online ad campaigns, or your traditional print ads, tracking your return on investment is something we strongly believe in here at Spectrum Marketing Group. As a we have evolved as a marketing agency, the most common mistake we see that clients have made, prior to working with us, is the lack of tracking their leads. We have seen clients spending anywhere from $500/month to $15,000/month, all be unable to answer the question “Where are your leads coming from?”. Here are some simple, and some more complex options to tracking your marketing return from various media sources…

Offline ROI

When running an ad in your local newspaper, or specialty, niche magazine, there are several options to get a better ROI on your investment. Consider these options:

• Call Tracking – if your goal is to get a direct phone call, then a small investment can supply you with unique call tracking phone numbers that ring to your business line, but can provide a detailed report on the sources of the phone calls. This is especially useful for businesses investing heavily in print.
  • Recommended industries: automobile advertising, real estate advertising
• Custom URL’s / Landing Pages- so you may be investing in branding ads in a magazine or trade publication, and be expecting that consumers will visit you online. Studies show often consumers will simply do a Google search after seeing an commercial or seeing a branding ad. This lead is often then lost. The option is set up a unique URL or landing page such as SMGnewengland.com/special-offer or even use a URL shortener, such as short.nr/promo. The shorter the URL, the easier to remember, and better chance of direct conversion. A great piece to get in depth on this, can be found at: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-track-online-roi-of-offline-advertising
  • Recommended industries: all industries, especially effective for websites with shopping carts

Online ROI

• Analytics! We often see clients not knowing anything about their online traffic. Analytics can easily be installed from our good friends at Google, and is something we install with our all of our web development projects. The analytics can be customized and tracked to show all your internet lead sources, and truly evaluate your ROI. If you are not using analytics, go do it now!
• Landing pages & CTA buttons – one of the other ways to optimize for ROI is to build in landing pages into your site to better convert visitors, and to also make sure you have Calls-To-Action on your pages. You can then evaluate what works best for each service.