How to Tell If Your Advertising Is Actually Working

Most small business owners can tell you roughly what they spend on advertising. Very few can tell you what it returned. That's not a failure of attention — it's usually because nobody ever gave them a way to check.

Here's a conversation that happens in every small town. A business spends real money on advertising for a year. At the end of it, someone asks whether it worked. And the honest answer is a shrug — maybe? we were busy in July.

That shrug isn't carelessness. It's what happens when the thing you bought was never measurable in the first place.

Three words worth knowing

Advertising has a vocabulary designed to sound more certain than it is. Three terms do most of the work.

Neither column is dishonest. Impressions are a real measurement of a real thing. But a number in the left column tells you about the opportunity you bought. Only the right column tells you what happened.

If the only numbers you're given are estimates of who might have looked, you haven't been told whether it worked.

What you can measure without paying anyone

Three of these are free and take minutes to set up.

1. Google Business Profile insights Inside your profile, Google shows how many people found you, what they searched to get there, how many asked for directions, how many called, and how many clicked to your site. Check it monthly. This is the most useful free data most business owners have never opened.
2. Google Analytics on your website Free, and it shows where visitors came from — search, social, a link on another site, or typed directly. If a campaign is sending people to you, this is where it shows up.
3. Ask every new customer how they heard about you The oldest method and still one of the best. Write the answers down. After sixty days you'll have a clearer picture than most reports would give you, and it costs nothing but the question.
4. Use a different landing point for each campaign A specific page, a distinct phone extension, a code at the register, or a link with a tag on the end. If everything points to your homepage, everything blends together and nothing can be separated out.

Four questions for anyone selling you advertising

Including us. Especially us.

"What will I be able to measure, specifically?" A good answer names things from the right-hand column above. A vague answer about exposure and brand awareness is a signal that nothing will be measurable.

"How long am I committed, and what happens at the end?" Ask whether it renews automatically, what the notice period is, and what happens if it isn't working in month three. Get the answer in writing.

"Can I talk to two current customers?" Anyone with happy clients will say yes immediately. Hesitation here tells you a lot.

"What happens to this after the campaign ends?" Some advertising disappears the moment you stop paying. Some keeps working — a page that stays online, a listing that keeps ranking, a story that still turns up in searches next year. Both can be worth buying. But you should know which one you're getting.

Work out what a customer is worth

This one calculation makes every advertising decision easier, and most owners have never done it.

Take what an average customer spends in a visit. Multiply by how many times a year they come back. Multiply by how many years they typically stay. That's roughly what one new customer is worth to you.

For a lot of small businesses that number is in the hundreds or low thousands. Which means an advertising spend that feels large is often paid back by a surprisingly small number of people — and once you know the number, "is this worth it" stops being a feeling and starts being arithmetic.

A note on this piece: we sell advertising, so treat this as interested advice and check it against your own experience. The free tools listed above work regardless of who you buy from, and the four questions are worth asking us as readily as anyone else.