The great thing of IM is that every advertisement you place can be tracked. For example every click that arrives at your website can be tracked. For example, you can monitor pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements down to the level of the keywords that the searcher typed in to find your ad. Proceeding a step further, you are able to track the resulting sale coming from that click. Irrespective of whether you’re using free or paid advertising to get traffic to your web site, it is important to be able to quantify the results of your campaign.

As a business organisation, you ought to know your return on investment (ROI) for your advertizing campaigns. In the domain of offline advertising such as newsprint or magazine classified advertisements, you’ll often find that advertizers use a different section telephome number or Post Office box for each advert. They use the an equivalent mailing address but add another departmental code. In this way, they can monitor how different ads perform based on the enquiries that get sent to the different departments.

This works as well for the 800 numbers that you call to get more information about merchandise that you’ve seen or learned about. Companies can establish different toll-free numbers used for each advert and that’s how they can track 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 Post Office boxes.

In the online world, however, tracking becomes inexpensive as you are able to implement it using an mixture of scripts or software programs. With pay-per-click advertising, you can 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 can set it up so that in each advert you use a different 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 business month and work out which campaigns are generating the best ROI. You are then able to scale those campaigns or fine-tune them to try and maximise your profits. If you’re not monitoring today.