I was just watching an interview with LeBron James following game 1 of the basketball finals in the USA. It was mostly basketball stuff however one of the journalists asked him who will be more popular on Sunday night, Tony Parker or Tony Soprano?

Tony Parker is a player for the San Antonio Spurs while Tony Soprano is a television character from the popular The Sopranos. LeBron loved this question as it was something new to him during the basketball interviews he takes part in.

It turned out that LeBron is a big fan of this television show and he had a lot to say about the upcoming episode. He mentioned that he will record the show and watch it after his basketball committments. In the end the journalists were all laughing as it was not what they expected from a basketballer.

LeBron even said thank you for the question as it was so different from what he was used to. You can imagine how it is when you are asked basically the same questions over and over.

This brings me to marketing. With LeBron James the journalists were surprised that he had such an opinion of the television show and thought it was funny for him to be talking about something other than basketball. If a company wants to use a sports star to sell a product that has nothing to do with the sport the player participates in how much impact will that have?

For instance would you buy a kitchen appliance from a company just because LeBron James was appearing in a commercial promoting the product? If he was promoting basketball related products maybe this would have more of an influence on your buying decisions. I would be interested to hear your opinion.

Probably in situations like the above most companies could not say how successful an advertising campaign has been. For them to measure the success of a campaign they need some tracking mechanism. For instance have a specific telephone number to call when ordering the product that was advertised.

Tracking the results of advertising is one of the most important steps in the advertising cycle. Of course having a good ad to start with helps however if you don’t track the results you are just throwing money away.

Conversion statistics are also important. You need to know how many people are responding to your advertising. Beyond that you want to know what ads are converting to sales for you. If you are using adwords or some other form of pay per click advertising you are going to want to track at the keyword level.

The other day I was listening to a story about a guy that was tracking at keyword level and he found from his tracking and testing that just one keyword was making him all of his profit. Once he figured this out he stopped wasting money on advertising using the other keywords and ramped up his promotional efforts with the hot converting keyword. This dramatically boosted his profits.

The main thing I want you to take away from this article is the need to test and track your advertising efforts. Don’t advertise without it.