ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Business Related Discussion Advertising... What works, What doesn't work???

Yes.
I track all calls.
The phone book reps like to tell you how great their phone books are and how you'll bring in all these calls.
It's not nearly as impressive as they say.

When I show them my results they claim all the other electrical contractors are happy with their ads.
I know the other electrical contractors in the book don't track their calls. They don't have tracking number listed and I have called them posing as a customer to see how they answer the phone. They don't ask where I heard about them from.

The only way to know what advertising is giving you the best return on your investment is to track the calls coming in, track how many of these calls get booked and track the revenue generated from these calls. Throwing money into advertising and not tracking the results is not a good thing to do but I beleive many do it.

Ad content and placement is important in phone book advertising. If you have a bad ad it's not going to do well. I changed my ad and went from a full page full color ad to a half page black and white ad in one phone book. The cost went from $2,500 a month to $1,000 a month and I still received the same call volume.

More and more people seem to be using the internet.
Internet advertising gives me a better return on my investment. You need to keep up on your SEO.

In my accounting software I can bring up reports and graphs that show each of my advertising expenses and how much revenue was generated from each of these. It also has reports showing where each customer heard about me from and how much revenue was generated by each customer.