Faith Based Advertising

In re-reading that recent small business advertising report from WebVisible, Inc., (summarized here: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Midmarket/Small-Business-Search-Spending-Rises-Report-Finds-140656/), another thing struck me. The report states that “conversions are predominantly calls…”.

Darn.

The wonderful world of the world wide web, (would that be wwwww.?), was supposed to make everything so nicely compartmentalized and uber-trackable - this customer came as a result of this bit of advertising money, etc. etc. – right down to the last customer / penny. The days of not knowing which half of your advertising dollars were wasted were to be a thing of the past. But as it turns out, customers still like to pick up the phone and just call, and even if you ask them how they found you, darn them… most of the time they can’t remember, or they just blurt out something ambiguous like “the Internet” (which, as it turns out, is a pretty big place). And I’m not even going to speak of those customers that have the nerve to just show up at your shop instead of sending you a very source-traceable email request like they’re “supposed” to.

So, what’s an advertiser to do? Well, if I had to choose between more customers or knowing where every single one of my customers came from, I think I’d go with more customers. I’d say track everything you can but continue to give the potential customer as many ways to find and contact you as possible, even if some of them are less trackable than others.