Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

If you do PPC, then you can have different landing pages for different ads (and track effectiveness).
If you offer contact-us-for-more-info and/or case studies, then segment the audience based on their web actions.
You could have different phone #s (or emails) to call (virtual #s) that track ads.
You could ask the prospect what ad they remember when contacting you.

What Jay talks about work for short sales cycle sales, but aren't as effective for longer sales cycle products (which I suspect yours are).

When I work with clients in this case, there are two methods we generally use:

1) in order to track to sales, we make sure they are using a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) software program (most commonly, my clients use Salesforce.com). These are all inclusive (but that also means they come with heavy overhead requirements, so will take time to manage and run) that track every relation that a prospect has with your company (clicks on an ad, reads an emails, meets a salesperson, etc.). Even with this, still not perfect and offline ads don't connect as well (the different phone numbers/emails per campaign and vanity URLs that Jay mention can help this if you use them).

2) due to the challenges of tracking ROI on advertisements (even with a CRM), a common process is to not track ROI directly, but track some action that hopefully leads to ROI. What we are often doing is tracking people who download white papers, case studies, sign up for email lists, watches a video, or other action that we believe are more likely to lead toward a sale than just web page view. You can go into Google Analytics and use what they call "conversions". This is where you set this next step action (the downloads, etc.) so it can be tracked. We do this even with clients who use Salesforce.com.

This all said, we often lean more toward online pay per click advertisements over offline print ads or similar, due to the added ability to track the online ads. not clear the online are more effective ads, but we do know we can more easily track the results of the online ads.

Particularly for high-ticket, infrequently purchased capital goods, advertising is often not subject to ROI standards. It's there to maintain general awareness among a very narrow target audience (usually in trade magazines).

You could, of course, start an awareness tracking study. You would poll a sampling of the target audience every 6 or 12 months and see if there are changes in attitudes and awareness. After a few updates, you'd have a rough sense of what is working and what isn't. The cost of these kinds of studies is more reasonable than it once was, but it may still be more than management would want to spend.

If your target audience is VERY small, there could be other reasons why you might want to consider an awareness tracking study. For example, it demonstrates that you care about perceptions and are eager to get input from the marketplace; that you are the thought leader in the industry; etc.