The Challenge of Measuring Print Advertising ROI

The challenge of the recent history of the publishing industry has been plagued by a lack of reliable performance metrics for advertisers. Fortunately, there are some new gimmicks that help to connect print to web.

The value of print advertising has always been a problem to quantify. Even when it was the only game in town for B2B marketers – long before the Internet and e-mail – we marketing professionals were always looking for the elusive ROI to report to our clients. If an advertiser spent $100,000 on space advertising, he figured he had a right to know what he was getting for his money.

The Bingo Card

Publishers came up with the "bingo card" as a way to encourage response and justify the cost. This was the tip-in card in the magazine that readers would fill out and mail back to the publisher indicating their interest in specific ads or press releases. The leads would then be forwarded by mail to the advertiser, who could then tally up a specific set of "hard contact inquiries" – or even orders - to establish the ROI. The downfall is that this method didn't catch the people who lacked the patience to wait three or four weeks for a mail reply.

The Toll-Free Number

If a reader wanted answers faster, he would simply pick up the phone and call. The toll-free number was great for readers, but it posed real problems for advertisers who didn't have a good qualification method for tracking lead sources. When we or the business owner looked for the data, it often wasn't there.

Once again, publishers scrambled to find a solution. They collaborated with the phone companies to create multiple toll-free numbers that could be assigned to ads in each of several different trade magazines. When the phone bill came in, we could relate all the incoming calls to specific magazines, and tie actual orders back to the phone inquiry to measure ROI. It wasn't simple, but it was doable.

The Benchmark Study

Another method we employed was to ask the publication to conduct a Benchmark Study, comparing the perception of the advertiser in two separate studies, typically 1 to 2 years apart, to help determine if our investment in that magazine made a measurable difference in how the advertiser's brand was perceived over time. This took patience and a commitment to a particular publication. Making course corrections was about as easy as turning a battleship around, but it did seem to be fairly reliable. Compared to today, however, when you can literally view clickthrough and conversion stats for the pay-per-click advertising you ran yesterday, most marketers can't afford to wait for a time-consuming benchmark study anymore.

The Internet Game-Changer

Along came the Internet, and everyone started publishing their web addresses in their ads. Pretty soon, digital reporting became available, so we could view traffic statistics, visitor behavior, and some lead source data. This was terrific for any form of digital advertising, because all the clickthroughs could be identified. However, for print advertising, there was no reliable way to tell whether traffic came from a particular magazine.

So, savvy marketers tried using unique web addresses that could be tied directly to a published source, like www.CompanyName.com/Ad1. We cleverly thought that the reader would use the complete address to find what he wanted, but, in fact, most readers simply dropped the suffix entirely and browsed the advertiser's site from the home page. Fat lot of good that did us! So we tried inventing completely new URLs that redirected to a specific landing page. That worked great when we could do it; unfortunately, a number of our clients insisted that their brand name appear in the URL, and so we couldn't actually adopt this practice uniformly.

The Future of Print

Meanwhile, in an ongoing effort to validate print advertising, inventive new techniques are being introduced. In one week alone recently, I was introduced to two new products that promise to connect the print world to the digital one. The first is the USB Insert™, which claims to be the first "print-to-web tool". It's a "revolutionary patented product that integrates a detachable, customizable, die-cut USB web key into just about any collateral print media you can imagine. Here's a link to their website: http://www.usbinsert.com/. Basically, the user punches out a die-cut USB key from a print piece, and it brings up the advertiser's landing page when inserted into his computer.

The second is a new Microsoft product called "Tag". It's essentially a barcode, an optical machine-readable representation of data, which lets paper magazines create visual links to content which can be "opened" simply by pointing a smartphone's camera at them. To be able to "read" tags with their phones, users must download a piece of software. Luckily, Microsoft has supported most modern smartphone operating systems to do this. To read more about this technology, go to http://mashable.com/2010/02/01/microsofts-tag/.

The big question is whether any of these new tools, or others, will help. The jury's still out, but the publishing industry continues its quest for answers.

Contact Alan at agladish@praxisagency.com.