How to Measure Return on Investment for Newspaper Advertising

Calculate Newspaper Advertising ROI

Without consistent marketing and advertising efforts, most businesses will not survive. Mass media advertising outlets can be extremely expensive to properly utilize, so understanding how to determine the potential and real profit of your method could save your business a substantial amount of money and reduce wasted efforts on ineffective advertising techniques. Newspapers are popular mass media outlets, and prospecting ads can be easily created, maintained, and updated to further refine your marketing efforts and track the success of each piece.

Instructions

1. Knowing your initial marketing expenditure is essential to properly measuring the return on your advertising investment. After negotiating with the publication and choosing the size, type, and duration of your newspaper advertisement, make a note of the total cost to run your campaign.

2. Properly track the results of your ad. Create a spreadsheet in anticipation of your newspaper advertisement's initial success in motivating interested prospects and potential customers to contact your business. Any time a prospect calls as a result of your newspaper advertisement, enter that person's name and information in your spreadsheet.

3. If conversations with the prospect create a realistic possibility for conducting business, make a new client file or folder as you normally would, and add a simple mark or flyer indicating the origin of the prospect was your newspaper ad.

4. Analyze your net sales figures. At the end of the month, tabulate your company's total gross sales figures. Subtract the ordinary and usual expenses for your business, and also include the amount of your newspaper advertising costs. The resulting figure is your net profit.

Tips & Warnings

• If your newspaper marketing plan includes multiple advertisements, especially if those ads are in different newspapers, you should arrange for separate inbound telephone numbers to properly track the success of each ad within each paper. Contact your office telephone provider and discuss the addition of several more phone lines. Each newspaper advertisement should contain a new and unique response number, which can then be reviewed to examine the ad's popularity.

• Successfully growing your business through print and newspaper advertising can be very expensive. This is exacerbated by the fact that most people, even highly interested and qualified prospects, must see your company's name and view your advertising message multiple times before actually taking any actions.

References

• ZeroMillion.com: How to Tell if an Advertisement Costs Too Much

Resources

• MarketingForSuccess.com: Advertising Breakeven Calculator
• AllBusiness.com: Calculating ROI for Direct Marketing