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16 Sep, 2013

What's the ROI on Print Advertising?

Breaking down Return on Investment in advertising.

ROI or Return in Investment is one of the most confused marketing terms there is. But while advertisers rightfully want to understand how their ad dollars are effecting their companies' bottom line, there appears to be more and more difficulty in achieving it. Therein lies the problem.

For our purposes however, as an advertiser trying to determine how much of the print advertising spend translated into sales, there first needs to be a bit of clarity to its meaning. For example, even if we are looking at how print advertising translates into sales, technically we should be using the term Return on Ad Spending (ROAS), but often the terms are so frequently used interchangeably that we will go with ROI.

The first step to determining ROI is evaluating what it means to your business. What qualifies as "success" - a lead, a conversion, increased advertising awareness, increased brand awareness, et al?

Compare this to digital which many argue can be measured easily in the way of clicks and thus is a way to quantify an ad's effectiveness. The problem however is that most serious marketers have debunked this idea. Clicks alone are meaningless. Google Analytics and other traffic counters help understand your traffic, but that's only one small measure of an ad's effectiveness.

But the same principles apply to print. there are a variety of methods that can be used to help track ROI, however the question remains, is this data relevant? The short answer is yes:

This contradiction shows us that the ability to measure ROI isn’t stopping any marketers from testing new digital media frontiers. It also means, however, that they are sticking to tried and true marketing efforts with results they can measure. This holds particularly true for traditional media, especially as the study found that marketers answered that their ability to measure offline ROI increased from 44% in 2012 to 47% in 2013.

Here are some things you can do to calculate your print "ROI":

1) Add a coupon in your ads and have customers bring the coupon in to your business for a discount, and count how many people use the coupon.
2) Put copy in your print ad that says something like "bring this ad in for a free gift!" and offer your consumers who come into your store a free gift, and again count how many are used.
3) Calculate your average monthly store traffic prior to the start of your print campaign, then calculate it during, and then after campaign is over, so you can get a sense of how much the print impacts your traffic.
4) Ask clients "How did you hear about us?" and then calculate how many of them say "from your magazine/newspaper ad."

Also of course you can calculate any increase in sales to determine the effect. However its important to remember that with print, in particular with with magazines, it is a very slow-build medium. It takes a long time for the total audience for a monthly magazine to accumulate, meaning that a print ad that you run in a given month could have its desired affect on sales in two or three months down the line as it gets passed around and new people are exposed to the ad.

Ultimately real ROI from all advertising mediums comes from engagement (acquisition, etc) so its important to understand what true measurement means in all your media channels and apply techniques that allow you track them.