It’s a problem I see all too often in the advertising copy world. Companies hire copywriters who create cleverly worded articles with no clear headline. The advertising copy sounds great when you read it, but it doesn’t actually generate sales.

Whenever you hire someone to do something, you should expect that person to deliver clear results. An IT consultant should improve your computer systems and make them more reliable, and a legal team should protect you from any potential lawsuits. Similarly, an advertising copywriter should improve the response rate you get from all of your marketing publications, both online and offline.

While many businesses agree with the above statement, almost none of them are willing to go through the trouble to put their writers to the test. They like the work that they see, and they assume it is good enough without giving any question to the real results it generates. There is only one way to truly know your writer has helped improve your business, and that is to test, test, test, and then test again.

How do you test your writers?

The online world makes it incredibly easy to test your writers. You can install analytics software on the individual pages you are concerned about and see how many people click through to the buy page or area you want to funnel them to. If you know what the clickthrough rate was before you hired your copywriter, you will have a basis of comparison for the new copy written. It’s a nearly flawless way to test your writer’s effectiveness.

Other forms of marketing content are a little trickier. If you are running a mail order campaign, you will need to to create a separate return phone number, physical address, or email address for each different print brochure you send out. That way, you will be able to know which brochures are getting the best response rates, and by extension, if your copywriter is doing a good job.

Don’t forget to use some of your previous marketing materials when testing your new copywriter. The new copy might not do as well as the previous copy, so it’s good to know that the new copy really is an improvement over the old copy. Sometimes, in spite of what our intuitions tell us, a piece of copy that we don’t like actually does a much better job of generating sales.

Where is the advertising industry headed?

Even in 2010, the advertising industry is still lacking the scientific rigor that has brought success to so many other fields. Clients are all too happy to hire a copywriter based on connections and image alone instead of documented results. Regrettably, I must admit that I myself am mired in this mess. In order to put food on my table, I work with clients who don’t test the copy I write. They’re more than happy with the job I do, but I sometimes wonder how I have actually helped them.

The decision to adopt scientifically rigorous standards in advertising lies on the shoulders of those who hire writers to improve their marketing campaigns. I undoubtedly want to see the industry move in this direction, but I can’t get all of my clients to see it the way I do. So consider this a challenge. I want you to make my job more difficult. I want you to demand more testable results.

My writing might sound great, but ask yourself this. What is it actually doing?