Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

Your instinct is dead on: many prospective customers would rather simplify their life instead of helping your ROI measurement this way. And this also means, unfortunately, that you are unlikely to get such customers to 'admit' this in a survey: they probably won't bother answering the question.

So how many customers do this? We will need to derive this from your data: because visits to your main page may go up for different reasons, I would regress main page visits on these factors and your print campaigns, and interpret a significant coefficient for your print campaign.

hope this helps

koen

Each campaign is likely to be different. However, there are a few things you can do to increase the likelihood that they'll type in the unique URL.

First, keep it short. The harder it is to type, the less likely it is that people will do it.

Second, make it easy to remember, like "cars" in your example.

Third, provide an incentive. Offer some sort of reward, discount, book, etc. for those that go directly to the landing page.

Fourth, depending on what the ad is, and your services, people may call or contact you in other ways (after they see the ad). Ask people to mention the ad when they call (again offer an incentive to do so), and remember to ask them where they saw your ad.

You'll never get 100% tracking or recall, all you can do is make it as easy (and worthwhile) as possible.

Jodi

Oh, and one more thought.

Put a box on your home page that says, "See us in ___ magazine? Enter your code here." Entering the code (which would be the URL, explained in your ad), gets them to the landing page.

Jodi