Print, Radio and the Website They Reach

What actually happens after an advertisement

Almost nobody types a web address they heard on the radio.

They remember a name, or part of one, or the service and the town, and they search for that later, from a different room, on a different device.

Which means the destination of an offline advertisement is not your website. It is a search results page.

And what happens there is decided by whether you are findable for whatever they retained.

The retention problem

• Names are misremembered, particularly unusual spellings.
• Numbers are not retained from audio at all.
• Web addresses are approximated rather than typed.
• Offers are remembered vaguely, without the conditions.
• The trade and the town are what people actually retain.

The last is the useful one. Somebody who cannot remember your name will search for the service and the area, which is a search you either appear in or do not.

Which makes ordinary local search visibility a prerequisite for offline advertising working, rather than a separate activity.

Being findable for what they remember

Three checks worth doing before spending anything on print or radio.

Search your business name and confirm you appear first, including for plausible misspellings.

Search your main service and your town, and see whether you appear at all.

Search anything distinctive the advertisement will say, such as a slogan or an offer name.

If the answer to any of those is no, the advertisement will send people somewhere you are not, and the money buys awareness that a competitor collects.

A worked example

A business running radio spots for a seasonal service.

The advertisement named the business and the offer and gave a phone number.

Enquiries rose during the campaign and the business could not tell by how much, since almost all arrived by phone with no stated source.

What they noticed afterwards, in their analytics, was a rise in searches for their business name during the campaign weeks, and a rise in visits to the homepage.

The homepage did not mention the offer, because it had been created for the advertisement and existed nowhere else.

People arriving having half-remembered a promotion found no confirmation of it, and a proportion left. Adding a line to the homepage for the following flight resolved it.

The advertisement and the site must agree

The most common and most avoidable failure.

An offer stated in an advertisement and nowhere on the site produces doubt at exactly the moment somebody is checking.

Which is worse than not having the offer, because the visitor now suspects they misremembered or that the business is not the one they heard.

Anything an advertisement says should be visible on the site for the duration: the offer, the terms, the deadline, the service being promoted.

A single line on the homepage is usually enough, and it should go up before the advertising starts rather than partway through the flight.

Short addresses and their limits

The usual technical suggestion, and it is partially useful.

A short memorable address, used only in that advertisement, makes the traffic identifiable and removes the ambiguity of a long one.

It works for print, where somebody can look at it while typing.

It works poorly for radio, where nothing is retained accurately and people will search rather than type.

Which means a short address is worth having and should never be the only route, and the advertisement should also make the business name clear enough to search.

The counter-case

Where offline advertising does not depend on search.

Anything producing an immediate phone call, such as an emergency service heard by somebody with a problem right now.

Direct mail with a physical response, or an advertisement in a publication people keep.

And local signage where the business is visible from the advertisement itself.

Even in those cases a proportion of people will search first, and being findable improves the outcome without being the whole mechanism.

Frequency and what it costs

Worth understanding, because it is where offline budgets fail in the same way small online ones do.

Broadcast advertising works through repetition. A single flight of a few spots is heard once by most of the audience and remembered by almost none of them.

Which means a budget sufficient for one week of low frequency buys almost nothing, in the same way a thin online campaign does.

The seller will present the reach figure, which is how many people could hear it, rather than the frequency, which is how many times each will.

For a small business the question worth asking is how many times a typical listener will hear it, and if the answer is once or twice, the money is better spent concentrated into fewer weeks.

Measuring it at all

Difficult, and there are partial methods worth combining.

Ask every enquiry, which catches what people remember and is the most reliable.

Watch searches for your business name in Search Console, which rises during effective offline advertising and is a genuine signal.

Watch direct and organic traffic during the campaign weeks against the surrounding ones.

And use a distinct short address or a code for the portion that will use it.

None of those is complete on its own and together they give a reasonable picture, which is the most that is realistically available for this kind of advertising.

The lead time

Worth planning around, since the site work has to happen first.

Search visibility for a service and a town is not something that can be arranged in the fortnight before a campaign runs.

Which means the sequence is the site work, then the advertising, with several months between them if the visibility is not already there.

Booking a flight of radio for next month and hoping the site catches up is the order that wastes the money.

1. Search your own name and confirm you are first.
2. Search your service and town.
3. Put the offer on the site before the advertising runs.
4. Note the current name-search volume as a baseline.
5. Brief whoever answers the phone on what the advertisement says.
6. Ask every enquiry where they heard of you.

The fifth is routinely forgotten and produces the worst version of this failure: a customer quoting an offer that the person answering the phone has never heard of.

Why the traffic appears as it does is covered in the job that came from a van sign.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.