Online Coupons: Another Way to Track the Success of Your Business Profile

November 14, 2008

 

Since the start of advertising through mass publishing, coupons have been a great way to test the effectiveness of an ad run. Simply put, if a lot of customers in your target market came to your store to shop and used coupons from your ad, then you had a pretty good idea that the ad did two things:

 

A. It hit your target market and

B. It was effective at bringing in customers

 

Have you noticed that when you use a store coupon at your local favorite shopping spot, they scan the bar code on it? That’s so they can track which ad the coupon came from and how many people in that area are using the coupons from that ad. From that information, they know they can continue sending the same type of ads to the areas that performed well while changing the type of ads sent elsewhere that were ineffective.

 

Your business profile is, essentially, an online billboard. The only difference is that it sits on the information super highway instead of a physical highway. However, unlike a “real” billboard, your virtual billboard can take advantage of coupons as one method of tracking its success.

 

If you know from checking your reporting that you are getting visits to your profile, you may be wondering if any of those visitors are following up with a phone call or actually coming in to your store or other place of business.

 

Calls can easily be tracked thanks to InLocal’s call tracking feature. But if you want to know whether people are actually making a physical visit to your location and making a purchase, online coupons are one way of estimating that metric.

 

If customers are bringing in coupons that you placed in your profile, then you can use that information to guesstimate the number of conversions your profile is resulting in.

 

The downside to this is that even if nobody brings in one of your online coupons, it doesn’t necessarily mean that nobody is converting. It could simply mean that those people aren’t interest in or didn’t see your online coupon.

 

To improve the odds that somebody will see your online coupon, make a mention of it right in your business description. Remember that you are allowed to use HTML, so make it stand out by enlarging the text and/or changing its color.