“Enough with the hand-wringing over ROI. If you can measure how much traffic a given piece of content has driven to your website, you have vastly exceeded the measurability of 95 percent of advertising since its invention.”

– White Horse Marketing VP Eric Anderson, iMedia Connection, July 21, 2010

Amen to that, Eric! Let’s not overcomplicate.

Maybe we should just set aside the term ROI. It’s seen so much abuse, it deserves a rest. Instead, let’s talk about results. You have a goal. You take steps to reach it. You get results. Simple.

Or is it? How do you measure marketing results without a lot of hand-wringing? Here’s one approach.

Define your goal.

Say you have 25,000 square feet of vacant office space. Your goal is to lease it.

Map out a plan to reach your goal.

Will you go directly to prospective tenants or brokers or both? Will you try to find one large tenant or a lot of small ones? What tactics will you use to reach them? Events? Direct mail? Internet marketing? All of the above?

Set your metrics.

Of course, the ultimate metric is your vacancy rate. But you’ll want some interim measures. For each tactic you use, think about what results you’d like to see. Those results can be as data-driven as click-through rates and unique pageviews. Or they can be as basic as getting one key broker into the space.

Track …

It’s easy to track the open rate for e-mail and the number of visits to your website. But what you really want to know is who those people are and what they did on the site. A batch of clicks from a company with a competing property may not help you. But one brochure download from the aforementioned key broker could be the first step in sealing a deal. That’s the data you need to see.

… and tweak.

Not getting the results you want? Tweak the tactics, double-check the strategy and try again until you get to your goal.

This process may not calculate your ROI. But it will spell out your RWR — real-world results. And isn’t that what counts?