Learn From Our MASA Ad Mistake

Our company made a marketing mistake.

I’m going to tell you about so you don’t repeat it.

We sell email marketing software to many schools and school districts. So we recently ran a print advertisement in the membership directory for the Missouri Association of School Administrators (MASA).

The ad included the address for our website designed specifically for schools and districts: k12.marketvolt.com.

In the same MASA directory, there’s an ad for the AdvancEd Improvement Network. Their ad also included a website address: advanc-ed.org/MASA.

We got our ad wrong. They got it right. Do you see it?

That web address — advanc-ed.org/MASA — redirects to their front page. They could have sent traffic to their site with the shorter “advanc-ed.org. But they added “/MASA” to the address?

Why? So they can measure whether the ad worked. When they review website traffic data, they can see exactly how many people landed on their site via advanc-ed.org/MASA.

I assume that address is unique to that ad. So they can measure exactly how many people landed on their site because of that ad.

We can’t measure our ad’s effectiveness because k12.marketvolt.com is not unique to our MASA ad. That address is on business cards, email signatures, trade show banners and other marketing pieces.

So we can count how many people reach our site by entering k12.marketvolt.com, but we have no idea whether they got their because of the MASA ad.

Sure, we can ask new prospects, “How’d you hear about us?” But that never generates meaningful data.

So when we debate whether to run an ad in next year’s MASA directory, we’ll be flying blind.

Shame on us, especially because we did not practice what we preach. For years, we’ve emphasized the importance of trackable URLs.

Print advertising still can work. But it works best when you can measure and test.

We blew it this time. And we’re not alone.

Advanc-Ed’s was the ONLY ad in the directory that is trackable. I recently paged through some local business journals and found ZERO ads with trackable links.

Creating a trackable web address is not difficult. Web developers can easily set a unique address — i.e. k12.MarketVolt.com/MASA — to redirect to any other page (such as the front page). WordPress and other web publishing systems include plugins to allow non-technical people to create redirects with ease.

Better yet, you can create a custom page for a given ad. Rather than redirect k12.marketvolt.com/MASA to our front page, we could create a specific page for our MASA audience. Trackable and more effective tailored content.

The thing we shouldn’t do, the thing you shouldn’t do: Put that generic link — www.oursite”.com — without trackability. If you can’t track it, you can’t know if it’s working. So you’re potentially throwing money down the drain.p.s. Many advertising reps for print publications. Hate this trackable link idea. These are the ad reps who don’t want you to measure traffic precisely. They fear you’ll conclude the ad didn’t work (and you’ll have the data to prove it). Don’t let them talk you out of customized links. It’s your ad, your link, and your business on the line.