Print advertising

how do you assess them

[mack]

when runing print adverts how do you determine their sucess?

[korkus2000]

I have found that offline advertising is very dismal. You really don't get the responce you would expect. One way to track it is to print an alternate homepage for tracking like www.mysite.com/printad/. I think if you got .5% of the viewers of the ads going to your site then it is a success.

[NeedScripts]

I guess that is the beauty of toll free numbers. You get 5 toll free numbers for about US$ 5/month [Plus pay for call :)]. Now while running ads, you can use seperate toll free number for each ad. [Hey, it sounds like having multiple domain at search engines]

Above method is cost effective and works great.

[korkus2000]

The reasons for print advertising is either announcements or brand recognition. With brand recognition ads need to be an on-going thing. You have to brainwash a target audience into recognizing your brand. Announcements will work better if the information is interesting to a targeted demographic.

Announcements are easier to see results because thay are really looking for action by a viewer. You are able to see who shows up or calls about an event, sale, or product.

To really succeed in offline advertising you need to saturate the market and this cost a lot of money. One ad in a newspaper really won't accomplish that much. An ad campaign with billboards, magazine ads, newspaper ads, bus boards, and posters for a few months can make a large impact. It should depend on your expected ROI.

[Drastic]

You can promote a separate url in print. Add a subdir like /sale/ or /deals/, if you just use /a/ some people will probably just type the domain and check root. Give them a reason to want to see what's in that dir.

Or, just use another domain altogether, an easy type-in name. I would set it up on a host for it's own robots.txt and logfiles, ban all bots on it, and redirect to your main site.

If you have some kind of intake form, make your print ad a selection on "How'd you hear about us?"

[mack]

The reason for the question was... I recently started a new job as a as a sales rep for a "print version" business directory. mostly localalised. what I was suggesting was to have at the base of each advert ourdomain.com/advertiser and to have a page containing more information about the company and perhaps a map.. that way the advertiser will see clicks and will have to assume that came from the print publication (indirectly) what would you be looking for if you where purchasing a print add and would you concider my above example to be a good sugestion?

[rcjordan]

mack, if your perspective is from the print side, you'd better give serious consideration to developing realistic click-through amounts from the ads. Every, repeat, every print/web project I know (about a half-dozen, including two BIGdog newspapers) has had to make a mad scramble to cover their abysmal CTR.

[korkus2000]

Most businesses ask where a new client found them. Thats where they usually see their ROI. I am not sure that just clicks will get them. Most brick and morter businesses want to see a client who will tell them your business directory made me contact you. I think the click idea will reinforce what you are providing.

[mack]

The biggest problem is that most of the advertisers we have been targeting are small local companies... ie general stores etc where a customer will simply apear as normal and shop. Certain advertisers that sell produxcts of a higher value ie furniture shops are more likely to enquire how they where found. I dont really think there is a lot we can do from our end to try and get the end user to inform the business where they found out about them. Other that of the business was to offer some form of incentive..ie a small discount for bringing a tear off from the advert...but not many companies are going to be willing to offer a discount simply to track their CTR.

If only the real world had log files :)