Is print advertising still on track?

There's a growing trend with marketers shifting some or most of their print budgets to digital. The first and foremost reason is the significant difference in cost as online display advertising has extremely low CPM's in comparison to print. Another strategic advantage of online display advertising over print is the flexibility it allows marketers. A campaign can be launched within a few days for any length of time and a limited number of impressions can be purchased which allows for a small budget test. And lastly, online display advertising has advanced tracking capabilities through embedded URL codes, which provides accurate lead and conversion metrics for a campaign. But does online display advertising drive sales?
One of the most repeated lines in marketing comes from nineteenth-century retailer John Wanamaker, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half." The problem with print display advertising is that most marketers aren't aware of the effectiveness or impact of their campaigns.

They aren't tracking the leads and conversions that are a direct result of a print campaign. Direct response print advertisers are the exception as they're able to track the results of a campaign through a coupon, BRC, coded URL and/or coded toll-free phone number. And surprisingly, the majority of direct response advertisers utilize print instead of digital display advertising. Why is this the case when it seems that online display advertising has so many advantages over print? The overwhelming response is that despite the higher cost and limited campaign flexibility, print produces more quality leads and sales conversions with a lower cost-pe-lead and cost-per-conversion over online display advertising.

So the problem then is that many print campaigns are not effectively tracked and therefore cannot provide an effective ROI measurement. The solution is to integrate direct-response mechanisms into your print campaign (i.e. coupon, coded toll-free phone number and/or coded URL). Or better yet, create a contest, sweepstakes, raffle or giveaway and drive traffic from print to a dedicated website landing page. This integrated approach has proven to be extremely effective in producing successful campaigns with impact that can also be measured on the back-end through website analytics. So before reallocating a print budget, think about ways to integrate tracking components into your campaigns to see how effective the power of print is.