Tracking a company’s marketing is a way for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of the ads they are running. The obvious ways of tracking advertising are simple things like putting coupons in print ads or clients mentioning a special they saw that caused them to come in.

“One common way to track marketing is by asking customers how they found you,” explains Yvette Jones, owner of designCraft Advertising, Madison, Wis. Jones, a NARI member, has spent the last 10 years working with remodeling clients to improve their advertising efforts. “In general, that can be one of the least reliable ways to find out how they found you because customers tend to mention the last ad or impression that caused them to come in.”

It can take three to four impressions before a client comes to see a remodeler. Because of that, there were probably earlier impressions that allowed that impact to build up and wasn’t necessarily just the last ad that brought them in. Studies have also shown that if given a choice, people will sometimes pick out media that was not used in a company’s advertising.

“The point is that it’s not a real reliable way to find out where people are seeing your ad,” says Jones. “In order to try to make it more reliable you can list particular publications, but still you’re relying on people’s memories.”

It’s important to differentiate between awareness advertising and call-to-action advertising. Awareness advertising is meant to build credibility and is not meant to generate immediate results that will appear in advertising tracking like call-to-action does. To track awareness advertising, a remodeler is going to need to use benchmark comparisons. For example, if a remodeler decides to spend advertising dollars in May, they’re going to want to compare their sales after the ads to the previous May or to the month before the ads.

Online tracking

One thing that has changed considerably in the last several years is that there are many more tools for tracking online advertising. The most obvious of these tools is Web site tracking that can find out which Web sites people are using to get to a remodeler’s Web site; which pages people are viewing on its Web site; how long they’re staying on those pages; and which pages they’re going to next. Web site tracking is a good way to tell if a company home page is less than effective, especially if people click on it and move away very quickly. That means that the search terms associated with the Web site may not be representative of what the Web site has to offer or that they were disappointed in the feel of it right away.