I’m probably a bit old fashioned in that I subscribe to three newspapers which land on my driveway most days (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution).    I find I can scan each paper and get the news I need in less time via hard copy then by clicking and scrolling with the online version.

While reading the Sunday NY Times, I noticed several things.  First is that expensive watches are advertised primarily on the inside front page (page 2) of the main section..  Don’t know why that is but it’s a pettern I’ve noticed.  Second, is that while every ad in the front section (except one small, reverse-type ad for Lumber Liquidators, includes the URL of the advertiser, in only two of the ads (2 of 27) does the URL list a subpage or identifyer of where the ad appeared.

Why is that wrong?  Two reasons:  First, one of the principles of marketing is to track where your business comes from.  If companies use only the URL of their home page in print ads, they have no idea how much traffic that ad drove to the website, so they don’t know how effective the ad was and if they got their “money’s worth” from it.  If I’m running the same ad in three publications, I need to know which one pulls the best.  So, my URL in the ad in the NY Times would be www.BlahBlah.com/NYT, while the same ad in the New York Post would end in /NYP.  Capiche?

Second reason:  Whenever possible you want to deliver people to a page on your website that is related to the ad or offer.  In Citibank’s ad for the Citi View mobile app, the URL is www.citi.com/view.  Excellent.  At the other end of the spectrum is Tiffany & Co.’s ad for a $3995 diamond and platinum peace sign pendant. The URL shown? TIffany.com. Maybe they think that if you can afford a piece of jewelry at four grand you’re smart enough to find it on their website.   I wouldn’t risk it if I we’re them.

Oh yeah, all this applies to B2B marketing as well.

I welcome your thoughts.