Your website can tell you how your radio ads are doing
February 16th, 2007 • Posted by Bill Bice • Permalink
Diann Archambault at Face to Face Skin Care Salon & Spa left such a great comment that I had to turn it into a posting:
First off, SpaBoom does an incredible job providing powerful resources to small, boutique salons like mine.
Take this blog, for example. It is a gold mine of useful information!
Thanks for sharing the BODYWORKS Day Spa print ad.
There’s just one thing I might add…
Rather than driving ad respondents to one’s website, you might instead direct them to a unique URL which itself redirects to your website. This way you have the ability to track the effectiveness of your offline advertising, whether this be print, radio and/or television.
For example, I am running a radio ad on a local (Rochester, NY) station. Rather than direct listeners to the website for Face To Face Skin Care Salon & Spa (FaceToFaceSkinCareSalon.com), I am instead directing them to GetFaceToFace.com. This, then, forwards to FaceToFaceSkinCareSalon.com. … So now I can check the web logs for FaceToFaceSkinCareSalon.com and see how much traffic is coming from GetFaceToFace.com. Thus, I can benchmark the effectiveness of my radio advertising because the only people who know about GetFaceToFace.com are those who hear my radio ad.
Thanks, Diann, for the feedback and great idea!
A quick note on an important search engine optimization (SEO) consideration: if you employ this technique, then like Diann, make sure you do the right stuff technically so you don't get hit by Google's duplicate content penalty. Google doesn't like having multiple domains that point to the same web pages. For example, "www.yourspa.com" and "www.alsoyourspa.com" showing the same website can penalize your search rankings if not done right.
An easier approach, but not quite as effective in capturing stats, is to use landing pages: a new page on your website that you promote in your ads. For example, instead of "www.yourspa.com", you refer to "www.yourspa.com/radio". This works a lot better if you're promoting a special that you can only get to from that page.
Landing pages are easy to implement on your Dynamic Spa Website:
- Go into Setup, Website. Copy an appropriate page (home is often a good starting point), and give a short, easy to remember ID like "radio".
- Edit the content of your new page to reflect the special associated with your radio or display advertising.
- Direct consumers to the new page in your advertising: www.yourspa.com/radio.
- Use the Landing Pages report, looking at your new page to guage the effectiveness of your ads. You can see how many visitors came to your site by starting on your landing page, and the resulting GCs and appointments.
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