How to Track Advertising Success

How do you track your company’s marketing, advertising, and sales?

Do you have a system or a way of tracking how your company connects and deals with your customers and the public at large?

If you’re like many dealers, you probably use advertising and marketing that is difficult to track, so you might not even bother tracking numbers.

In my interactions with dealers across the country, I’ve found it’s more common for dealers to throw money at advertising and then determine if their sales went up the following week – that’s the extent of their tracking! Others may use bounce-back offers or simply ask customers: How did you hear about us?

There are a variety of ways to track the success of a specific campaign. There are also real benefits in organizing, tracking and interpreting your company’s CRM.

Years ago, Tiger Woods was ranked 5oth (or worse) in putts-per-round. Looking at this statistic one might think Tiger was not a very good putter. Yet, some golf analysts said Tiger was, in fact, the best putter. You see, the number of putts per round is just one of many stats to determine if someone is a good putter (similar to sales stats immediately following an ad campaign).

If you analyzed all the statistics as a whole you would see that Tiger ranked poorly in fairways hit, but number one in greens in regulation. This meant that Tiger was hitting approach shots to the green from tough lies in the rough. He also goes for nearly all par 5s in two shots. So he is either hitting to the green from the rough or from a long distance. He led the tour in greens in regulation, but his average distance to the hole after hitting the green was longer than most golfers due to the difficulty of his approach shot.

In other words, most golfers have a significant amount of approach shots landing five or 10 feet from the green, leaving them with a short chip to put the ball right next to the hole – a one-putt. This scenario makes a putting statistic look good, lower. But, that is not the same as being a better putter.

It’s the same reasoning with a dealership. If you only look at one statistic, that one set of numbers cannot tell the whole story. You should also look at:

How many people called, based on a specific advertisement?
How many filled out an online application?
How many clicked through to the website?
How many filled out another type of lead form?

Of course, the ultimate goal is sales; but other data will help you determine the success of your media.

For example, some media will help you collect more leads for today, but not generate sales for a month or more. You actually need to track that information (including follow-up) to determine how a certain media performs – i.e., if a media collects numerous leads up front but very few sales, you may assume it was a poor campaign. But what if the campaign led to more sales in a few weeks than you have ever had before? You might not consider it to be a poor performing campaign — if you are tracking your success.

Tracking everything can also help you determine broken links in the chain. Say a specific media brought in a significant number of phone calls but not a lot of sales. The breakdown may be the person answering the phone and not the media itself. If a campaign brought in a significant number of online applications but no sales, it might be due to poor follow-up, or even poor targeting. It’s difficult to tell unless you track everything.

Here are some ways to improve your marketing, advertising, and sales:

Use a good CRM to track from lead source all the way through to sale.
Use tracking phone numbers (except on your main website and local pages).
Use tracking links when possible.
Require mandatory training for ALL staff to understand the importance of tracking and how to participate.