Most advertising is an expense – or worse – a mystery expense. It works like this, most of the time: spend money on some ads, not knowing whether those ads will work, and hope for the best.

Ogilvy is famous for saying 50% of his ads work – he just didn’t know which 50%.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

You can make your advertising – and more importantly your marketing – a profit center instead of an expense.

How do you do that?

Simple. Make it a no-way-to-lose proposition.

1. Make sure each ad has a call to action you can measure (call this number, click this link).

2. Measure the response to each ad and each call to action.

3. Do more of the ones that work and less of the ones that don’t.

This way you get something from every ad – even if the something is only knowledge of what not to do. You never lose; you always profit either by knowledge or dollars.