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Thanks to technology, you've got a big file of data available for your review and analysis. But what to do with all those numbers? How do you change them into English? How do you help them tell you a story about an advertising campaign?

Search engine advertising tools like Google AdWords have helped many a business see a leap in numbers, but few have found the magic formula for measuring success.

Read on for valuable suggestions from our readers about making metrics work for your organization.

Show me the numbers

We're a small company, and one of our challenges is creating metrics to help us ascertain how well our advertising and marketing efforts work. A few advertising campaigns we currently have in progress include a search-engine-results-page text ad, newspaper ad, email newsletter ad, and an event sponsorship. What are the methods for measuring the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, and which is best?

—Marisol, Marketing Assistant

Don't drown in data. Instead, start small with these three steps:

1. Review your business model and objectives

2. Keep your metrics simple

3. Assign a unique identifier for every campaign

Review your business model and objectives

Next Marketing Challenge:

Branding on the desktop—does it lure in prospects?

Click here to offer your advice or here to ask a question.

Consider taking a look at your organization's business model to help you determine what to measure. Profits? Turnover? Customer loyalty? Also, what are your business objectives and goals? What is the particular goal of your advertising campaign? Define metrics to tie in with those, then before you gather data\ figure out how you want to track your campaigns and what you want to track.

If you're focusing on an online ad campaign, for example, you may want to track different types of leads and which leads result in sales. One way of tracking this data is to use one many software products or your customer relationship management (CRM) system to measure visits to certain pages and click-throughs. (Continue reading for tips on creating an identifier for your campaign.)

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hank Stroll (Hank@InternetVIZ.com) is publisher at InternetVIZ, a custom publisher of 24 B2B e-newsletters reaching 490,000 business executives.