There are many functions within a business and each function should have a positive effect on the bottom line of any company, but the advertisements that your marketing department place are the 'front-line' in the war to get prospects to your website - so how do you determine how efficient your advertisements are?

Do you simply look at the number of sales and enquiries or do you look deeper and try to evaluate why people have come.

Of course, to determine how effective our advertising is we should look at a number of things...

Media type - this can have a big effect on where you should be placing your advertising bucks next time, for example...you may have received a ton of prospects from Campaign #1, but very few closing deals, yet Campaign #2 brought in fewer but more targeted prospects and a higher closing ratio as it was a different medium

Your budget - do you need to spend $100,000's to get great results? If you are a very large corporation you may need to, however if you think smart, there are literally hundreds of marketing weapons that cost very little but can bring in massive results. At the end of the day, your advertisement needs to make a profit

What was your objective - did the advertisement do what you wanted it to do? Did you intend to increase your company's brand awareness? Then look at including up-to-date market research to check on effectiveness. If you wanted a direct response, then was this response acted on?

Consistency - was this advert part of a series or a one-off? If it was part of a series - how much better has it performed than the previous 'control'. Are you consistently improving? Your target market - is your target market responding to your advertising or do you need to adjust the demographics...

It's useful to plan a meeting (regular if the campaign runs over a long period of time) to go through the data that you have collected for each account and measure the performance of the advertisement. You should begin to see a clearer view as to how efficient or not your advertising and marketing spend is.

As with all advertising and marketing...you should always test, test, test!

Ensure that you have a benchmark for your advertisements. In other words, define all the areas that you need to address (headline, sub-head, body etc...) and be sure that the copy is effective for your demographic. Once the advertisement has been placed, ensure that the important information (as highlighted previously) has been recorded and then alter a single aspect of the copy for the next advertising campaign you run.

The section of your copy that you choose could be any part, but start with the more identifiable parts such as the heading or sub-header of your advertising. Having chosen which part of the copy you want to change, do it and then run the advertisement again, checking the efficiency each time.

If the original control version performs better, then keep it. Should the existing advertisement continue to outperform the changed version, then stay with it and develop a new option...

Look at your advertisements as tools for your business. adverts that you place and inevitably pay for should never be implemented and then ignored - far too much of your cash-flow will have been expended for potentially no return. Make them work by determining the efficiency of your advertising and you will make the profit. Determine the overall efficiency by how much profit you are making, then keep and improve the best adverts and bin the poor performers.