Traditional Media such Television ads, Radio and Newspaper ads are forms of traditional media that auto dealers have embraced for decades. These ads require significant investment when all of the pieces are added up its thousands of dollars, but what’s the ROI?
I asked one of my clients about their ability to measure the success of their television campaigns and whether they could get data like “cost per conversion” or “impressions” or “click through rate” and not surprisingly they couldn’t.
I wasn’t trying to complicate things but perhaps I did. This post is to dive deeper into those questions.
Lets Define Some Key Terms
Cost Per Conversion – If an ad you’re running costs you $100 and the “call to action” (call to action is what you’re selling – a product, or email subscription form, etc) is completed 10 times then your cost per conversion would be $10.
Lead gen sites make a good profit at this because they can get websites to “convert” well. Convert meaning someone has taken the call to action. If you have a good conversion rate then it’s just a matter of pouring more money into the funnel, and that usually means pouring money into Google Adwords.
What are the differences between Traditional and Online Media
Here’s the deal. Traditional Media means you have to come up with a marketing campaign, film a 30 sec spot, record some content for radio, all which ends up costing say $5000. Then once you have it all ready to go it’s scheduled to appear in the paper, or on tv, or in the mailers, etc. It could take months for all of that to happen in some cases such as mailers to actually reach the target customer.
Traditional Media – You Cross Your Fingers And Hope It Works
Online Media – You Take Action And Measure
So for online media you setup a campaign, you outline what your “cost per conversion” goals are, then you pull the trigger. Within 24 hours you have data. If it’s not what you like to see, pause it.
Online Media Can Be Paused To Stop The Flow Of Money Before Its Gone
This is why online media is so valuable. You know what works, down to the keywords that convert, the ads that get people to submit a lead, the type of language people are responding to right now.
How Can You Combine Traditional and Online To Get Results
Now, Traditional Media combined with online media is really what I’m trying to help my clients understand. My client believes they can’t track traditional media, well here is a perfect example of how they can.
My Lexus client contacted me yesterday about a $1M sweepstakes they were doing in partnership with 4 other dealers that started today. I jumped on it, and in less than 12 hours we have a post up and most importantly, this is the key: It comes up in search when someone Google’s the name of the campaign.
This is critical.
If you really want to dive in and get your hands dirty, read this post from Vanessa Fox titled – Scoring Super Bowl 2010 Commercials – How’s the Search Visibility?
Sure that’s for million dollar campaigns, but then again that’s exactly what my client is doing so I suppose it fits.
Conclusion
You can track traditional media by being accountable for the contents and making some assumptions about what people may type into Google when they see the ad. The goal is to be #1 for that search phrase. The best way to do that you ask? Have a blog with enough authority like Lexus Of Reno’s blog and add that phrase to the title of the blog post.