Is your advertising working?

Advertising a small business is too expensive to do haphazardly. If you’re going to invest money into either print, radio, TV, or online advertising you need see a return on your investment.
Unfortunately, many business owners don’t know how to evaluate the success or failure of their ads. Ask them how well their advertising is working, and the best some owners can say is that they “think” their advertisements are working well, they don’t know which ads are working well, or they don’t know if any are working.
Don’t fall into this trap. To make the money you spend on ads pay off, you need to measure and evaluate your ad spend based on data.
The Problem
Although there’s a lot of science involved in advertising, there’s also a lot of art. Many factors are hard to measure. For example, if somebody sees your ad, comes to your store and doesn’t buy anything, that builds brand awareness. They may come back later when they need what you sell. In that case, your advertising worked—just not immediately. There are plenty of situations where advertising is hard to measure but that doesn’t mean you should give up trying. The fact is, most advertising is measurable if you design your campaign correctly.

Before You Advertise. . .
To measure the effectiveness of your advert, you need baseline data. What was your store or website traffic before you ran the ad? How were your sales? Did sales increase for the products or services you advertised? You will only know if you have past data.