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Adam: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog Soundbites, with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young, from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Adam Lefler, hello Dave.

Dave: Hi Adam

Adam: Dave, today were sitting down talking about measuring radio effectiveness on a website.

Dave: That seems like a crazy idea, doesn’t it?

How Do You Know If Your Radio Ads Are Working?

You’re running radio ads, and you’re trying to figure out if they’re working. One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is their desire for instant gratification. You want to know today whether those ads are working.

And actually measuring them on your website is one way to tell if they’re working today. You don’t really know when somebody’s need for your product or service popped into their mind. You don’t know what the driving factor was that made them decide that “hey, it’s time to call the HVAC Company,” or whatever your business provides.

But your website can give you a general idea of how well your unaided recall is working, and the way to do it is to identify those visitors as you’re looking at the sources of traffic on your website. Use a product like Google Analytics, which is free. If you don’t have it on your website, if you don’t have any kind of analytics, put Google Analytics on, or have your webmaster do it. It’s free, and it’s powerful, and it can answer some really interesting questions for you.

Which of Your Web Visitors Are The Result of Your Radio Ads?

You can divide your traffic up several different ways. First, look at organic search results, meaning how many people are searching for you and what words are they typing into the search engine to find you? Then there is direct traffic. These are visitors that are coming directly to your domain.

So, if I said, “check me out at shortcutblogging.com, and then somebody goes and clicks on their address bar and types shortcutblogging.com in there, they’re going to go direct to my website. They are not going to show up as an organic search with some kind of a keyword in Google. But it is going to be tracked. Google is going to say “Hey, here’s a visitor that went directly to the domain.”

But you could also go to Google and just type in the word “shortcutblogging” and search for me that way. Or you could type shortcutblogging.com into a search engine and get there that way. Any of those three ways and I’m going to know that you probably heard an ad somewhere or somebody told you about me, and that’s how you ended up on my website…because you searched for me by name.

Very few of us are going to search for a business by name, if we’ve never heard of them. So, if you’re an HVAC company in St. Louis, Missouri, and someone types in “air conditioner repair” in St. Louis, Missouri, it’s probably not the result of your radio ad, right? Because they’re not looking for you by name, they’re looking for anybody that can help them. Does that make sense?

So, as you divide up that traffic, just look at the keywords. If you’re Adam’s Air Conditioning in St. Louis, Missouri, then you look at anyone who typed in the word, “Adam” and air conditioning. They probably heard your radio ad, or they saw your newspaper ad, or their neighbor uses you, or whatever. But they knew about you, before they went to Google.

If Visitors Know The Name of Your Business, They Must Have Heard Of You

Somehow they heard of you. And if the only way that anybody’s talking about you is through paid ads, on the radio, or in the newspaper, or anywhere else, that’s an indication that those ads are working. If people are searching for you by name, and they have no other reason to, it’s a result of your ads. Have faith that that’s what’s happening. And if nobody’s searching for you by name, you probably don’t have a very effective schedule or a very effective message.

That’s how I do it for clients and I’ve got some clients with 60-70% of their traffic to their website is coming in by someone searching for them by name either by knowing their domain, by knowing the entire name of their business, or just some piece of it. I count all of those as success for the offline media campaign.

Adam: You’ve been listening to BrandingBlog’s SoundBites with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young.  For more information, you can visit Dave Young’s BrandingBlog.com. Please feel free to share this podcast by sending the link, or the mp3 to some one who can benefit from the information. Thank you again for listening BrandingBlog Soundbites with Dave Young.