Ad source tracking?

bagelpirate

My small company has recently sent out a few advertisiments, and I wanted to know if any of you had any tips on how to track which ad people came from?

Right now I have a "How did you hear about us?" in the form that comes through email, but I dont have a way to compile this information.

Any tips?

AtomBomb

I think we need a bit more info. How are customer's responding to the ad? Are they going to your website, or doing mail-order, or coming to your location? What is the ad for?

bagelpirate

The ad's direct them to a free estimate form on the website and our phone, no one comes to the addresss.

The ads are just simple service ads, some with coupons.

I was more looking for advice on how people generally went about these things. I can make it more specific to my job field later on.

Daenris

Well, if it's not already, I would make the "How did you hear about us" a list of responses rather than a free form response. Like flyer, web ad, tv ad, radio ad, internet search, friend, maybe an Other option where you ask them to fill it in.

That way you can easily keep track of information about which ad stream is bringing you the greatest response and can potentially look at other stats (percent of people who respond to <type of ad> that eventually become customers to find your highest bang for the buck, etc).

If nearly everyone fills in Other with something else, you can maybe add that into the list.

If you actually want to look at the data the key is just in keeping it in an easily quantifiable form.

AtomBomb

If you're sending them to a web form, you can have each ad direct the user to a different page and track it that way. Something like www.whatever.com/estimate and www.whatever.com/free and www.whatever.com/calculator, etc. all with the same info. You can do the same thing with phone numbers, but it's a bit more expensive. If you have multiple extensions you could put that in the ad. "Simply call 123-4567 and dial ext. X to speak to a representative". Send all the extensions to a single person and have them note which one the call comes in on.


*edit- fake links got url tags. how do I make it not do that?

Szechuanosaurus

What AtomBomb says - you can even name the url something that relates to the specific advert. Like, if you advertised in a specific newspaper, the URL could be whatever.com/eveningtimes or if it was an email circulated amongst a specific business demographic, such as accountants, it could direct to whatever.com/accountant. Makes advertising effectiveness metrics a dawdle.

This is a modern version of the quote ref. code where you put a reference in an advert that a customer can quote for a discount. The code includes a (usually fairly obvious) reference to where they saw the advert, so a magazine ad. might include a reference code vanityf0804 (vanity fair, April 2008) so you know exactly which adverts are performing and even which magazines are most read by people interested in your products, which can be very important when the cost of placing ads has to be accounted for. This also helps better target responsive groups in the future or suggest if adverts need to be tweaked if they aren't appealing to a certain readership.


Since you've already sent the adverts out, you might need to reverse engineer a solution. The 'How did you hear about us?' field is going to be much more effective if it is accompanied with a drop down menu or radial button menu that includes a list of all the places you've placed adverts as well as the default 'A friend/family member/business associate', 'Internet Search Engine' etc. Depending on how frequent email responses are, you may want to manual compile this information into a spread sheet in an application such as Excel, which will let you sort or graph the data (a pie chart should give a good graphic representation of the success of different advert positionings). Alternatively, you might want to look into having the email form compile the information directly into CSV format so it can be more automatically compiled into spreadsheet and database formats if there are too many responses to effectively process manually.

Bear in mind that with a multi-choice 'how did you hear' option you will get a lot more false positives. Some people will just choose the first option, some may have heard of you from more than one place and the option they pick may not actually have been the one that actually lead them to make an enquiry, others will obnoxiously choose the least representative option for them etc. By and large though, it's an unobtrusive canvasing method and most people won't be too bothered about giving the correct information.