Measuring Magazine Ads ROI

[Basicskills]

I've been currently doing some targeted magazine ads for our products. We are a brick-n-mortar store and have a website. The ads have a link to our website so I'm wanting to measure the amount of people that come to the site from a specific ad.

My thoughts are that instead of using mysite.com in the ads, I should use mysite.com/ad1 for that advertiser and mysite.com/ad2 for this advertiser. And from the entrance stats on those pages measure a rough roi. I'm sure some people will still just type mysite.com and leave the /ad1 off.

Do you think this is an ok way to measure a rough roi. Any other techniques or ways you've tried or know of?

Basic

[allreal]

That is the method I am using. If you read any magazine you see big names also do this. However, they offer some sort of discount or freebie from coming in through the link such as www.site.com/ad1. This way you can see how many people come from this link, how many sign up, etc. Adding any reason to make them use that specific link will really help the campaign.

[poster]

Using www.site.com/magazinename should help (and incentive as well)
Or www.site.com/free

[GuyFromChicago]

Publish a "promo code" in the magazine ad. Make people enter it somewhere on your landing page for access to some sort of freebie or premium content.

[RyanJonPilling]

poster brought it up, but I wanted to be really clear...

If you make your tracking code look like an important or special link, then they won't cut it out. I'd say the key is to make it relevant to your offer (and I sure hope you aren't advertising without a compelling offer!)

so... You're advertising "free shoelaces with purchase of shoes"... your address could be www.myshoes.com/freelaces

In other ads, you could do variations... freeshoelaces, lacemeup, bonuslaces...

I recently addressed this same issue when building my affiliate program. I didn't want to use traditional links (like myshoes.com/?aff=you) and opted instead for putting custom codes in sub-domain format. In our example... freelaces.myshoes.com

However, I personally would be wary of using sub-domains in print. I think the www. goes a long way to people recognizing it as a domain name. Especially if you're targeting a general (non web-savy) audience.

Yes, you could print www.freelaces.myshoes.com but that's just a different opportunity for confusion.

Overall, I'd say people understand the sub-directory (/folder) approach more than the sub-domain.

-Ryan

[cimmeron]

I'd agree and definately make it meaningful and related to the article/ad.

[sixty6]

I've seen numerous users create a seperate landing page for Google Advertisements and they actually include incentives for visitors from Google Ads, this might also work

[cimmeron]

incentives are always good; my thought was if it was a magazine ad, you'd want the URL to be catchy enough that the reader would remember it later if they didn't immediately go to their computer...