How can you ensure you know how well your advertising money is being spent? At Brand X we believe in making ourselves accountable for our results, so you can evaluate us and so we can evaluate and constantly refine our own activities. How do we do this?

The answer is simple. We track everything.

Brand X manages a significant number of client campaigns, and that activity generates a great deal of useful data. Our clients are given access to performance data not just on the general campaign level, but down to specific pieces of creative used with specific media on exact dates.

In 2007, Brand X made a decision to partner with a serious provider of tracking technology, and the company we chose was TraceWorks. Their system, Headlight, captures an enormous amount of campaign data, including the number of clicks and conversions (e.g. registrations, purchases, account applications or downloads) from each piece of material we create and distribute.

In addition to that, it also measures clicks and conversions from organic search (e.g. unpaid search engine results from Google, Yahoo!, Live and others), direct entry (e.g. visitors typing a URL into their browser window - an important metric for offline campaigns and brand awareness), external links (e.g. directory sites, blogs, forums and affiliates) and Google Adwords. This amount of data enables us to steer our activities towards what works, and away from what doesn't.

In our view, tracking general campaign data is important but it's only part of the puzzle. We also do something special with campaign tracking, which is to reconcile individual conversions back to their specific source. Our clients can then provide us feedback on which campaigns produced the hot leads and which ones just produced the numbers but maybe without as high revenue potential.

To learn more about how we use Headlight in our campaign activities, contact us and we'll tell you more about closing the loop to complete knowledge on your campaigns