For a long time now our company has been tracking where our sales come from by using special links in emails and using the http referrer to determin search engine referals and other website’s inbound links. This has been working well but has been a source of controvesy at times since some parts of our team see that we gain sales from emails and search engines primarily and yet all of our marketing speniture goes on more traditional marketing methods such as adverts in publications, printed brochures, exhibitions.
The reason we don’t just stop doing it is brand awareness. This is more difficult to measure. Essentially, someone could buy a product because they saw one of our webpages as the third result on Google and clicked on it – fine, a sale through search engine marketing. But what if they only clicked on the third link because they had heard of the company – the expensive marketing methods had raised awareness of us so that when they saw the company name, that brand was reputable enough to make them ignore the other providers.
That is what we now are going to try and track through simply asking the customers the question. Problem is that if asked, could you remember how you heard about Apple’s iPod? Probably not and this “brand awareness” problem is what I want to remove. Marketing people love it as it adds an element of mystery to what they do and can therefore gain them bigger budgets.