The great thing about IM is that every advertisement you place can be tracked. For example every click that comes to your website can be monitored. For example, you are able to track pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements down to the level of the keywords that the searcher typed in to see your advertisement. Proceeding a step further, you are able to track the resulting sale coming from that click. Regardless of whether you’re using gratis or paid advertising to get traffic to your web site, it’s crucial to be able to measure the effects of your campaigns.

As a business, you ought to know your return on investment (ROI) for your advertising campaigns. In the realm of offline advertising such as newsprint or magazine classified advertisements, you’ll frequently find that advertizers apply a different department telephome number or postal box for each ad. They use the same mailing address just adding another department code. In this way, they can track how different advertisements perform based on the enquiries that get directed to the different departments.

This works as well for the 800 numbers that you contact to get more information about products that you’ve seen or learned about. Companies can establish different toll-free numbers for each advert and that’s how they can monitor the effectiveness of multiple ad campaigns. In offline promotion, it’s much more expensive to arrange for the tracking. Imagine the costs associated with arranging different phone numbers or multiple PO boxes.

In the internet world, however, tracking becomes inexpensive as you are able to apply it using an mixture of scripts or software packages. With PPC advertising, you are able to easily use a simple PHP script to enable you to capture the keywords coming from a Google search referral - not to mention Google analytics.

Let’s take a look at another example. With a lot of web hosting packages, you’re allowed to set up multiple email addresses. You are able to set it up so that in each ad you use another email address. Then when you get an email inquiry to a specific e-mail address, you’ll know where that inquiry originated from. Another way to do this is to create multiple subdomains to use as the link in your ads. For instance, if you’re advertising in online sites, you are able to duplicate the same ad copy but send the subscribers to a different subdomain using a different URL for each ad.

When you’re able to track the efforts of all your advertising, you’ll be able to sit down at the end of the calendar month and work out which campaigns are generating the best ROI. You can then scale those campaigns or fine-tune them to try and maximise your profit. If you’re not efforts today.