If you don't track your marketing, you're driving blind.

When I used to be an ad agency client many years ago, I'd occasionally ask my account exec how he knew if my company's ads were working or not, and I always received either 1., a puzzled or annoyed look, or 2., reasons why we should focus on something else. Tracking in those days was generally asking the front desk if they'd had a lot of phone calls since the ad ran.

But without tracking how you know for sure that you're putting ads in the right places? The good news is that there are ways to track marketing, and they don't add a lot to the budget. Here are 3 easy tracking mechanisms that anyone can use:

Web site unique visitors data—notice I said "unique visitors" and not "hits." With Web site statistics you can see exactly how many different people have visited your site over a given period of time. Check them when you are advertising (make sure your ads include your Web site and an invitation to go there) and you can see at a glance any spikes in Web traffic in the immediate time period and compare it to before and after the ads ran. By the way, if your Web site doesn't already have statistics, don't wait another minute to add this feature. There's a free statistics program at http://www.googleanalytics.com/.

Unique phone number—for a small monthly charge you can add a phone line to your business that is specifically for use during your campaign. Use this number ONLY on your advertising so that the calls that come through can be attributed to your ads. Remote call-forward the number to your main line and you won't need to change any of your internal procedures for call-handling, and you'll have a report of call traffic when you get your phone bill each month.

Manual tracking—the easiest method is also the one that sometimes gets overlooked. When you land a new client or get a call from a potential client, ask them how they heard about you. If you have a contact form on your Web site, include "How did you hear about us" along with the "Name," "Address," and "Phone number" fields. The key is that you keep a running log of the responses and make sure that everyone in your organization tracks the same way.

Marketing budgets are tight right now, so implement tracking methods to help you see exactly what's working.