Run a digital advertising campaign and you can monitor click-through rates (CTR), social media engagements and goal tracking in Google Analytics to see how the campaign’s doing. These tools are useful when it comes to adapting the campaign if you aren’t getting the desired results.
It’s just as important to track print advertising campaigns and make similar adjustments, but it can be harder to monitor the results of non-digital adverts. Here are a few tips for measuring print advertising effectiveness.
Tracking Print Adverts to Maximise ROI
- How Did You Hear About Our Company?
- Unique Landing Pages
- Coupons and Special Offers
- Monitor Your Sales
How Did You Hear About Our Company?
Whether they’re print or digital, advertising campaigns aim to raise a business’ profile and persuade customers to buy a product or service. The print materials you send might encourage people to visit your website, so it can be difficult to know which visitors have arrived at your site from social media, organic Google searches or as a direct result of the printed adverts that you sent out.
An easy way to find out where someone has come from and why they’ve visited your website is with a quick survey question at the checkout or in a post-sale follow-up email. “How did you hear about our sale?” is all you need to ask. Offer them a dropdown of options and monitor how many customers choose your printed adverts.
If no one’s choosing the print advert as their reason for visiting, then you know that your advert isn’t having the right kind of impact on your target audience and it’s time to adapt your strategy.
Unique Landing Pages
Just because your advert is print rather than digital, it doesn’t mean you can’t use the same monitoring techniques. Instead of including your website’s homepage on your print adverts, send those that see it to a unique landing page.
If you’re going to do this, we’d recommend keeping the URL short and easy to remember, especially if you’re looking at posters, banners, billboards or other methods that someone might only see in passing.
Like with digital adverts, you can then use website analytics to measure return on investment (ROI), traffic, conversion rates and other valuable data that gives you an insight into how many people visited the page and how many were then converted into customers.
Use different landing pages within the same campaign to see which adverts do the best and where your response rate is highest. For example, use separate landing pages for a direct mail brochure and a large billboard to see which attracts the most visitors.
Coupons and Special Offers
Despite what you might have heard, print advertising is just as important as ever. But to have a successful print campaign, you need to offer your customers something and show you value them.
Flyers and booklets are perfect for vouchers that customers can use to receive a discount when shopping with you or even for getting their hands on a free item. Hand them out at exhibitions or include them in packages sent to existing customers.
A discount or special offer can be an extremely successful way of attracting new customers to your site as they can make someone feel valued. Like with the landing pages, create unique coupon codes for your different advertising methods and use the data to see which is the most effective.
You can also use that data to better understand your demographic and create detailed and more targeted campaigns in the future.
However you choose to distribute them, coupons are an easy way of measuring the effectiveness of your print advertising campaign. Coupon codes can be tracked like any other aspect of your website, so you’ll know exactly where a visitor has come from when they redeem a discount code.
Monitor Your Sales
Of course, you’ll always be tracking your sales and monitoring your business’ performance. What we mean by this is keep the date that you started your print advertising campaign in mind and when you think people began to see your adverts.
See if sales figures improved or remained consistent after this date to see if your adverts had the desired impact. This method is less accurate than some of the others we’ve covered but it’s a quick and inexpensive way of measuring how effective adverts have been.
If you’ve noticed no improvement in sales but a large spike in website visits or phone calls, then the advert is doing its job but customers aren’t finding what they’re looking for when they engage with your business. This would mean the advert is a success but there are other changes that you need to think about making.
Talk to B&B Press About Your Next Print Adverts
With these monitoring techniques in mind, you probably can’t wait to roll out your next print advertising campaign. To make sure your adverts are eye-catching, professional-looking and effective, talk to the B&B Press team. We’ve been providing the best quality service to businesses of all sizes for the last 60 years.
