Instead of viewing data on individual calls or ads, Kiracofe says he typically looks at ad performance in ranges from two weeks to six months. A report in early October showed that print ads in the previous six months generated only 8 percent of CBHK's total calls, yet represented about 95 percent of Kiracofe's ad spending. "And that's after a lot of reduction of print advertising," he says. "This system allows me to go back to our agents, and even our advertisers, and say this is the reason we're spending less on print."
The Campaign Manager has proven so effective, in early autumn CBHK expanded the scope of its ad tracking. Only about 50 numbers weren't being used at any given point in time, and Kiracofe wanted to track more Web sites than he had been. M5 had 1,000 additional phone numbers added to the bank within 18 hours. Now the system routinely reassigns 100 to 150 phone numbers each day.
The results? Kiracofe shares that he's been able to reduce offline ad spending by more than 60 percent since adopting this ad-tracking approach. During that time, CBHK's business has grown about 300 percent. "We're actually able to say definitively that by reallocating money from print and inefficient mediums into trackable and high ROI media that we're spending less overall and getting a much bigger return on our investment," Kiracofe notes.
Matt Griffin is a freelance writer based in the Philadelphia area and former associate editor of Catalog Success, a sister publication to Target Marketing.
The Business of Database Marketing