…it’s been never since my last confession.
I canceled an endorsement radio contract on something that I really believed to be working. The problem is, we have several endorsers running on this particular station in Los Angeles, and some of these endorsers have been running our ads for longer than these recently canceled guys.
Well, these guys are all about passion, and man, can they sell. However, though we certainly saw orders on the back-end, there weren’t consistently enough to be profitable for us.
My theory? The duplication on the station and overlap between programs had people typing in the code that they had heard longer. So, existing endorsers were credited basically with this new advertising.
Am I making sense? Let me back up. For the company where I work, we track everything based on a discount code that needs to be entered. So, if we’ve got an endorsement with John Smith and running 40 spots a week, and another endorsement with Janey Jane and we’re running 5 spots a week, chances are that people are going to type in “Smith” as their discount code instead of “Jane”, even if it was Janey Jane that finally pushed them over the brink of sales resistence.
Shame on me. In those situations, I should have anticipated that and figured a way to have other tracking in place…surveys, special offers, sign-in “where did you hear about us” queries. It’s all possible.