Tracking The Online Results of Your Offline Advertising.
As you know, tracking conversion rates by individual traffic source is critically important. Different traffic sources can convert at vastly different rates.Tracking the conversion rate of online traffic sources is fairly easy and straight forward. Simply use an adtracking program or service, or use one of the many server side options available.
However, for some reason many online business fail to effectively track the ROI from their offline marketing efforts.
This is unfortunate, because tracking the performance of your offline markting efforts is actually a simple process.
I frequently help my clients track the online results of their offline ads.
For tracking offline ads, I always recommend using a separate URL. (Domain names are cheap…)
The reason for this is simple… Testing has shown that in most cases if you use a tracking URL, such as a folder (www.mysite.com/newspaper) or a sub-domain (www.newspaper.mysite.com) your visitor will usually just strip off the tracking portion and enter your main URL.
This is lees of a problem with sub-domains, however often when you use a sub-domain they will leave the extra “dot” out of the URL (most non-techies don’t understand sub-domains) and just enter www.newspapermysite.com without the “.”
So by registering www.mysite123.com and then setting up a simple redirect on that site that goes into your ad-tracker and then to your landing page you can track all of your offline ads with ease.
Because domain names are so cheap I recommend using a separate URL for every ad you run.
Typically all you need to do is simply upload just an index.htm page to your new domain with either a javascript redirect or a meta refresh tag.
The code for the javascipt version is fairly simple.
Your index.htm page would look something like this:
<html><head>
<title>Your Title Here</title>
<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--
window.location="http://www.your-ad-tracker.com/ad-trackingcode?1234";
// -->
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Just set your adtracker up to send them to whatever landing page you want.
This is a great way to redirect affiliate links as well.
Happy tracking!
Eric
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July 14th, 2006 at 12:35 am
Eric: This is a great idea and something hopefully everyone is using. I would add that usually a simple redirect is not enough to pass information to the web analytics tools that will allow the analytics tool to track all the way to conversion. In this case a recommendation is to pass tracking_id from the redirect to your analytics tool to ensure accurate data capture.
In the case about you could simply pass ad-trackingcode=1234 and that will ensure great accuracy to conversion reporting.
Excellent post.
-Avinash.
Web Insights Blog www.kaushik.net/avinash