Tracking Your Advertising Dollars.
Every business knows that they need to have a multi-channel approach to marketing their business. Be it a multi digital approach including texting, website, and social or a multi-channel approach with TV, Radio, Social and Website. Every business out there is using multiple forms of advertising. Some call it a media mix, others call it a multi-channel approach, and we call it a hybrid media strategy. While this approach is necessary and quite honestly crucial, it can cause some headaches when tracking your marketing dollars. Just like having a strategy, and multi-channel approach you must have the ability to track.
In order to track you have to understand how your buyers shop. You may think you know how they shop, but have you ever really asked them? I will give you an example of a local car dealer that I have worked with. They got a ton of web traffic, we tracked it and where it was coming from, what pages they viewed, and what the conversion rate was, it was all very very good. They were very happy with the amount of web traffic and they finally understood that when KBB.com says that 83% of the traffic on your lot has been on your website, they believed it! Great web traffic and sales were up, life was good, and then the general manager says; let’s cut our entire advertising, wait what? The logic, like many of you would be- our website is providing great traffic and sales are up so we don’t need all that other “stuff” Having the ability to track where people were coming from was very important at this stage. The number one traffic driver was direct traffic, then Google search, then Facebook. So I asked the dealer for a favor, have the sales people when they are sourcing a customer, if the customer says “I was on your website” like most of them do, respond by asking “how did you hear about our website?”
You see people don’t just wake up one morning and say I need to visit www.yourwebsite.com or your Facebook page, they heard of it somewhere, somehow from someone or something. THAT is your true advertising source. The sales people agreed to do this and we soon uncovered that the Radio and TV advertising were helping to drive the traffic to the website. You see, we didn’t advertise the best deal of the week in their commercials, we advertised the website and the Facebook page. So when the time came to purchase a vehicle that website was the first on they thought of, which is also proven by the reporting showing that direct traffic was the #1 source of traffic. For all the direct traffic to your website or for all the times your business is searched on Google by name you have to ask yourself, how did they hear my name? How do they know about my brand? How did they know to go to my website? That is how you can track your multi-channel approach and know if it is working or not.
With the amount of advertising thrown our way every day, it takes more than the standard 3 times to hear a message, so the hybrid media strategy is a must simply because of the buying funnel and the amount of devices we all use. So the next time someone says I found out about you on the web or sends in a lead from your website, ask them, “How did you hear about my website?” They buying funnel is more than 2 steps so your tracking should be more than 1 question. Ask and ye shall receive, prosper and make good advertising decisions.
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