A client meeting in Seattle showed me a huge hole in our process

I was presenting a quarterly report to a small restaurant owner last month, showing all our usual metrics like clicks and impressions. He stopped me and said, 'Nancy, this is nice, but did anyone actually walk through my door?' I realized we had no system to track that. We spent the next hour writing down every customer who mentioned our ads, which was only about three people. Now we ask every new client for a simple way to measure real-world results from day one. How are other small agencies connecting online work to actual sales?

3 comments

3 Comments

king.aaron1mo ago

Went through something similar with a pizza shop last year and accidentally became their most loyal customer by testing our own tracking system. I set up a promo code for our Facebook ads that gave 10% off a large pepperoni, then spent three straight Fridays eating pizza while counting how many people actually used it. Turns out the code got used twice, but I gained 15 pounds and a deep appreciation for why restaurants need better tracking than my waistline can handle.

patp793mo ago

Yeah, tracking real sales is tough, but we started using simple promo codes for each ad channel.

keithbennett3mo ago

Nice! How do you handle people who see the ad but don't use the code at checkout?