I’m a sucker, I really am. I am naïve to the extent of being gullible and readily admit it. Sales people, advertising people, PRs, anyone with a slick tongue, makes short change of me.This is one of the reasons I’ve chosen to specialize in online marketing. The first time I experienced a web-based tracking and analytics tool I was hooked. For the first time I had access to up-to-date, objective, and validated data about my business at the tips of my fingers.

Advertising Campaign Evaluation - What’s the problem?

Monitoring traditional media advertising campaigns poses a number of challenges that nearly all arise from the lack of an accurate method to track the exposure and influence that these campaigns have. The problem is compounded by the fact that advertising campaign monitoring tools that do exist are usually unavailable to small business owners, who are essentially left with only the following monitoring options:

* Believing your agency - You can always choose to believe the numbers your advertising agency is supplying you with. These numbers are not objective by definition (your advertising agency has a vested interest in making things look rosy…).
* Questioning customers - Not all businesses allow for pleasant dialog between sales-people and customers and, although this method might generate wonderful anecdotes for you, it requires a lot of commitment in order to gather substantial amounts of hard data. One should always consider that any data gathered only reflects the opinions of those customers that took the time to answer your survey.
* Coupons - Advertising and tracking the use of various types of coupons is an excellent method to track campaign success however this method only factors customers that actually use coupons and gives literally no indication as to the effects exposure to the campaign may have had.

Online tools for advertising campaign evaluation

Now that we realize what are some of the challenges we face when we wish to monitor the success of an advertising campaign based on traditional media, its time to test what possibilities the online world has to offer us:

Every Click Counts

Although many of us are still unaware of it, every time we click on a link or button on a website or email, we are creating a record. These records can be collected and studied in conjunction with records left by other people clicking on the same links in order to create an accurate, up-to-date, and most importantly, objective report regarding the amount, type, and depth of exposure your messages are getting. Lets look at some great tools for monitoring the performance of your website and email campaigns:

Google Analytics

The really good news is that one of the best and most powerful tools for tracking traffic to your website comes from Google and is absolutely free! Google Analytics puts solid information regarding your visitors , referral sources, and content popularity at the tips of your fingers. Google’s statistics are easy to understand and excellent. The installation process is simple to perform and shouldn’t be any trouble for even rookies to accomplish. Once in place Google analytics will let you know:

* How many visitors are coming on to your site and what are some of their demographic characteristics.
* What sites and what type of search engine queries are referring traffic to your site.
* Which of your content is popular and is responsible for drawing traffic to your site and which of your content is unpopular and is responsible for people leaving your site.

Google Analytics is free and requires only a basic understanding of HTML in order to implement on your site.
The email option. Great even if you don’t have a website!

Email campaigns are a wonderful method to drive traffic to your website or, even directly to your business.
I have often advised business owners who had not yet gotten round to putting up a website for their business to do precisely that and use email blasts in order to invite customers to stop by the shop and collect some form of gift or enjoy a “members only" special. ReaderImpact, our email marketing solution, allows businesses to create and manage permission based (see footnote) email marketing campaigns regardless of whether your business has a website or not.

Managing email marketing campaigns on ReaderImpact is easy and requires no technical knowledge whatsoever. All you really need to do is sign up for a free, full feature, 30 day trial account on the ReaderImpact website, and you’re good to go!

ReaderImpact’s tracking and recording manager lets you see:

* How many of the emails you’ve sent reached their recipient.
* How many of you emails were opened by the recipient.
* Whether the recipient clicked on a link within your email.

What’s next?

Online monitoring tools are already having an immense effect on the advertising industry because of their ability to objectively and verifiably monitor an advertising campaign’s success. Better monitoring is already translating into big-buck savings for advertisers and an increasingly steady migration of advertising budgets from traditional media to email and other online campaigns. It definitely seems as if time is in favor of us suckers as ever more efficient and intuitive monitoring tools become available. The days of the shyster advertising salesman are nearly over.

I ,for one, certainly won’t miss him…

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For more information on email as a marketing tool for business and non profit organizations go to:
http://www.readerimpact.com/readerimpact-email-marketing-tips.html

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Footnote: What is permission based email marketing and how is it different from “Spamming"?
Permission based email marketing is email marketing that is sent only to recipients that have given their consent to receive email from your business. Permission based email marketing is the opposite of “spamming", which is the annoying bombardment of lists of unverified email addresses with marketing messages that the recipients do not want to receive.