Tracking print advertising

Internet ads are painfully easy to track. You put a banner ad somewhere. Someone clicked on it. Wonderful. You know where and when they did so.

But what about print ads? You advertise in two industry trade magazines, mainly because you know you have to but aren't necessarily sure why. What's it actually doing for me? People don't always say "hey, I saw your ad in such and such." Are people actually visiting my site because of these ads? There is no way to tell.

Not true.

Here is a great tip that you can use in your company's next meeting and people will think you really sat around and thought about it, when in truth you were on ESPN.com all day managing your fantasy baseball team that is currently ranked #9 out of 10 teams because you didn't know how to draft relievers.

Let's use our company's URL as an example, because I don't know your company's URL. Let's say we run ads in the Wall St. Journal and the NY Times. No seriously, let's pretend.

Instead of putting www.feverpitchmedia.com in both ads and having no clue who found us from what ad, use different URL's. Set up alternate URL's that take you to the same homepage. In the WSJ use www.feverpitchmediausa.com and in the Times use www.feverpitchmediaPR.com.

Only use those URL's in those specific ads and nowhere else. So when you track who came in from those URL's, you will know that they HAD to find you because of that advertisement.

You'll figure out really quickly whether or not you should continue advertising in those outlets.