Some basic information that guides how you use your advertising dollars is determining where your customers live and how they learned about your business.
A simple method is to ask each customer for their zip code and how they learned about your business and create a simple system to record the information. This can be done on a computer using an Excel spreadsheet or some other tabular system, or by doing listings and hatch marks on a piece of paper near your register (OK, I know this doesn’t sound very high-tech, but it works).
You can keep track of these zip code tabulations by the month or season, or after you have done a new advertisement or promotion.
Once you see the patterns, it can provide you with valuable information about where to focus your advertising dollars.