SMS advertising earns its place in your marketing budget only if you can show what it produced. Unlike paid search or social ads, you are advertising to people already in your database, so the honest comparison is cost per booked meeting or sale against your other channels. This article answers how to measure SMS advertising properly on the levelpartner.ai platform: tracking links, attribution, pipeline value and the reporting that tells you whether to send more, send less or stop.
Where text advertising fits in the mix
Paid ads find new people. Email nurtures them over time. Text advertising works on a narrower group: people who already know you and agreed to receive texts. It is closer to a direct mail piece for your best contacts than to a display ad.
That means you should judge it differently. Reach is small by design. What matters is how many of those contacts take a valuable action, and what that action is worth.
What to measure
Four numbers tell you almost everything.
- Delivered: how many messages reached a phone.
- Responded: replies, link clicks or keyword responses.
- Converted: bookings, registrations or sales that followed.
- Value: the pipeline or revenue attached to those conversions.
Opt-outs sit beside these as a cost. A send that converts well but drives many opt-outs is borrowing from future sends.
Before you start
- Tracked links set up in the platform for every advertising text.
- Pipelines in Opportunities with values on each deal.
- A source or campaign field that workflows can fill in.
- Dashboard access for whoever reviews results.
How to set it up
Give each advertising text a campaign name, use a trigger link in the message so every click is recorded against the contact, and have a workflow write the campaign name to the contact's source field and create or update an opportunity, with a value, when they book. Then put the send volume on a dashboard next to the results.
- Go to Dashboards and open or create a dashboard.
- Click Edit dashboard, then Add widget.
- Choose a widget from the SMS section.
- Set chart type, grouping and date range under Configure.
- Under Conditions, filter by Source or Workflow for the campaign.
- Click Save changes.
Add usage cost and staff time for each send to a simple tracking sheet, then divide by booked meetings to get cost per booked meeting, and compare it with your email and paid ad figures.
Suppose the agency spends £4,500 a quarter on paid social and gets 60 valuation bookings: about £75 each. Three SMS advertising sends to past clients might cost £180 in usage and £600 in staff time. If they produced 26 bookings, that would be about £30 each. On those numbers the case for building the consented SMS list is clear. All money figures are illustrative.
Attribution that holds up
The weak point in most text advertising reports is attribution. A client books a call two days after a text and an email. Which one gets credit? The platform records every touch on the contact, so you can look at first touch, last touch or both.
For decisions, last touch within a short window, such as three days, is usually good enough for text. Texts act quickly; if someone booked a month later, the text probably did not cause it. Our guide to SMS marketing strategy covers how text fits alongside other channels over a longer cycle.
Time it takes
Setting up tracking and a report takes half a day. After that, reviewing each send takes about twenty minutes. A quarterly comparison across channels takes an hour.
The mistake most people make
Reporting clicks as success. Clicks are cheap to produce with a curious or urgent-sounding message. They do not pay your team. Report booked meetings and pipeline value, even when the numbers are smaller and less flattering.
Leaving staff time out of the cost. A text costs little in usage, but writing it and answering replies takes hours. Include both, or every channel will look worse than text.
When text advertising is the wrong choice
When your consented list is small, text advertising cannot scale. Spend on growing the list through forms and events first. When you need new contacts rather than repeat business, paid channels do that job. For writing the messages themselves, see SMS ads, and for promotional formats see text message advertising.
Troubleshooting
Opportunities show no source. The workflow that writes the campaign name is not running, or it runs after the booking. Move the source step earlier.
Clicks are high but bookings are low. The landing page or booking calendar is the problem, not the text. Check the page loads quickly on a phone and has free slots.
Results vary wildly between sends. Audience and timing changed. Keep a note of both for each send so you can compare like with like.
Values on opportunities are missing. Set a default value per pipeline so reports are never empty.
Frequently asked questions
Is SMS advertising the same as SMS marketing?
Advertising is the promotional part of SMS marketing. Marketing also includes reminders, nurture and service messages.
Can I advertise by text to people who are not in my database?
Only if they opted in to hear from you. Buying audiences for text ads breaches consent rules.
How do I prove return on text advertising?
Track bookings and pipeline value from each send, add usage and staff time, and compare cost per outcome with other channels.
How often should I review results?
After every send for a quick check, and quarterly for channel decisions. Our text marketing campaigns article covers campaign reviews.