What Do You Spend on Advertising?

Small- to medium-sized business owners, for the most part, have a decent grasp on all of their expenditures and expenses, with the exception of one significant area. When I ask business owners what percentage return they are making from different marketing channels, the typical response is, "I'm not exactly sure but we're doing well so it must be all right." However, a dentist, for instance, will likely be able to tell me how much money each of last week's patients brought in, as well as how much he spent on labour, dental equipment, and office supplies. Why do conscientious and smart business owners who are careful about every other part of their companies spend significant amounts of money each month on advertising without any means of monitoring the results?

The reason is that small enterprises often attempt to mimic large corporations. Advertising to influence attitudes rather than to change actions is the form of advertising that most people are acquainted with and that is covered in most marketing literature. Although this has been tremendously effective for large firms, it involves a lot of effort, money, and continuous engagement with customers. The fact is that what works best for a large company may not work best for small to medium-sized companies and may even work against them.

The reason is that smaller companies sometimes strive to mimic larger ones. Advertising that aims to alter attitudes rather than actions is the kind that most people are acquainted with and that is covered in most marketing textbooks. Although this has been very effective for large businesses, it costs a lot of money, requires a lot of time, and calls on consumers repeatedly. The truth is that what works best for a large company may not always work best for small to medium-sized companies, and in some cases, it may even be detrimental.

Owners of small to medium-sized businesses ought to be able to predict with certainty that every dollar spent on advertising will generate at least two dollars in revenue. They also require the ability to track outcomes campaign by campaign. Business owners are hesitant to make changes since they only know that, overall, a company's advertising expenditure has a favourable return on investment; they do not, however, know how each campaign is performing. However, a deeper examination would show that most advertising programmes that see an overall positive return on investment are composed of both lucrative and loss-making components.The return on the overall campaign may be significantly increased by removing the unsuccessful components and expanding the successful ones. 

The three simple techniques listed below may be used to monitor the financial success of advertising channels like PPC and SEO.

Conversion tracking: Conversion tracking is a feature of several software programmes, notably the free service Google Analytics. Any page of a website can have a conversion target set up for it. Then, for that conversion objective, any visitor to that page would count as a conversion. For instance, a house builder could believe that a conversion occurs when site users fill out a form to "request a quote" with their contact information. When the submit button is pressed, a page reading "Thank you for requesting a quotation" will appear. Within two hours, a member of our staff will get in touch with you to set up an appointment.There are two functions for that thank you page. From the visitor's point of view, it lets them know when to anticipate a call, and from the company owner's conversion monitoring point of view, it informs them that a website visitor has turned into a lead.

The percentage of website visitors who become leads may then be easily seen. More crucially, tracking software can trace each visitor's path to the website, allowing for comparison of the proportion of visitors who become leads depending on the search terms they used, the advertising they clicked, and the landing sites they visited.

Call Tracking: Keeping with the roofing contractor as an example, only some people will submit a "get a quotation" form while others will pick up the phone and make a direct contact. Call monitoring becomes useful in this situation. Since this service is so simple and affordable to install, I'm genuinely astonished by how few firms are using it. Even ten phone numbers are a little price because you can rent a number for as little as $1 per month. A unique call monitoring phone number should be used for each advertising campaign. These may be applied to both offline and online advertising, and they allow for the precise tracking of the number of calls brought on by a certain advertising campaign.

Call monitoring is excellent for physical media, but what about traffic that is directed to a website? No matter the acquisition channel, everyone will call the same phone number because they all visit the same website, right? Wrong! Every advertising channel or keyword group should direct users to a tailored landing page created especially for the chosen consumer niche. This will assist with conversions in addition to tracking. Additionally, there are dynamic call tracking services that display a different phone number to website users who come from various sources and replace the phone number field on the page with a call tracking number.

Split Testing:  No matter how successful a campaign is, there is always room for improvement. Advertising on the internet may be quite flexible. In a digital setting, it is simple to test each ad across five distinct landing sites while running five separate adverts on five different advertising channels. Certain combinations will inevitably perform better than others. Once the low-converting efforts have been located, they can be stopped, the high-converting ads can be grown, and new campaigns can be developed to compare well with the high-converting campaigns. Even the brightest minds in advertising can't write flawless commercials or design flawless landing pages on their first attempt. It is hard to accurately forecast how various groups of individuals would respond to various offerings. Starting with a few educated assumptions is crucial, followed by ongoing testing to increase each campaign's return on investment.

You are effectively gambling with your advertising budget if you can't tell me exactly how much a lead from any given channel costs and what proportion of those leads will become customers. The overall return on investment from all advertising channels will increase month after month if tracking tools are put into place since you will be able to pinpoint exactly where you are generating and losing money.