Unless you have the luxury of being able to pay to build a brand, your adverts need to pay their way.

You need to make sure that you’re tracking response from your ads.

It’s rare to be asked where you found out about a business and, with the internet taking so much of people’s share of mind it’s easy to get lazy about tracking which adverts are paying their way and which adverts are just “there” but aren’t contributing to your bottom line profit.

Programs such as Google Analytics can help you to track where your internet visitors are coming from and can sometimes track right the way through to the sale – this is normally fairly easy if most of your sales are online but is decidedly tricky if most of your sales are done in the real world.

One simple way of tracking which adverts are effective is to use ficticious names. The easiest way to track that is to use first names and “key” those to the advert by matching the first letter of the name with the publication.

So if you’re one of the few people still using Yellow Pages (and you probably shouldn’t be) then you might key that with the name Yancy.

Then when someone calls, they’ll probably ask for the name you gave in the advert and you then deflect that by saying that person isn’t in the office at the moment (or even pretending that is your name!) and you’ve got near enough automatic tracking on your adverts.

You get the idea – it’s really easy to do and you can even use different names for different advertising campaigns.

The easiest thing to monitor is the initial sale from an advert but if you’ve got reasonable records in your business, it pays to track the value of a customer over a longer period of time. Depending on your business, this could be months or even years.

Obviously some business sales are one-offs, so lifetime customer value may not apply to you but you should still be checking whether it’s your advert, your Adwords campaign, your YouTube video, your Facebook page, etc that gets you the sale.

Check out this video for more ideas about monitoring your adverts: