credit: acameronhuff

Measurement is a big deal to many companies. How do you measure the response to various advertising channels? I still frequently hear companies complain that they can’t measure the ROI of their traditional media. Tracking traditional media is not that much different than tracking online content. Let’s start with a simple example: Running a contest on a blog.

Marx Foods runs fairly regular contest involving their product line, gourmet food. How would you track the success of this kind of contest?

• Search aimed at finding the content — title of the post, content of post, and brand plus post.
• Referrals — does referral rate increase?
• Direct access — do visitors enter and move to the contest page?
• Blog posts about the contest — not every reference will be a link.

This kind of contest is a cross-over marketing campaign. Potentially it could be referenced by print, radio, or television inciting even greater visibility. What are the signs that you have made that cross from one channel to another? A traditional media exposure will result in a spike in search and direct access followed by a growth in referral diversity.

Apply these same metrics to your business instead of a specific piece of content to establish the pattern that follows traditional media to the web.

Search Referrals

Following offline media exposure you should be tracking growth in brand and branded phrases. Clearly having your commercial air on the radio during rush hour is not going to cause an immediate spike search, but it does seed a search. What are people going to search when they get home? What they remember from your commercial: Whopper Virgins, “What Now,” or Trunk Monkey. People have bad memories. Following your traditional media you should expect a growth in the diversity of your brand phrase searches and search for you website.

Direct Access

Some people will remember you correctly and will come visit directly. If you traditional media is working you should be seeing direct access increase after each exposure and then degrade.

Link Referrals

After a general advertisement you should be looking at the number of sites that send you traffic. There are too many factors that affect the volume of referrals to make it a good indicator for the return on your offline media, specifically the traffic of referring sites is largely independent of your actions. But, a successful traditional media exposure will result in an increase in diversity of referrers. Why? Your media is going to result in diversity of searches, and brand interest, that will refresh and renew references to your business. After an offline media exposure you will see a short revival of under-represented referral sources and, hopefully, new new links to your site. Depending on how temporal your message is new links will vary greatly in their longevity.

Blog Activity

Even if the blog activity does not result in referral traffic it does fuel brand awareness, and subsequently supports branded search. Additionally blogs and websites provide a diverse perspective on your message and placement.

How to Look at Traditional Media

Traditional media exposure is not that different than online exposure, you just need to alter your perspective a bit to recognize the waves that are sent across the web by offline media. The latency that occurs between exposure and web usage will change the angle and velocity of your visitors, even if it doesn’t create a huge change in volume. To better track your offline media invest time into the way you filter and measure direct and branded search visitors