Keeping Track of your Offline Advertising with Analytics
While we are a digital and Internet marketing company, you can’t deny the reach of traditional advertising through mediums such as print, TV, radio, sky messaging, sticker bombing, sandwich boarding, guerilla postering, etc…
The point is, there’s plenty of other ways to get your business’ name out there other than digital marketing. Smart business owners should take the best of both worlds and combine them to form a customized advertising plan that works the best for their business.
Using Google Analytics with your advertising campaign takes it to the next level. It’s one thing to hope you’re getting results from traditional marketing, but it’s an entirely more valuable process to understand your action return on investment from these campaigns. While Google Analytics works wonders for seeing the results of your online marketing and where your traffic is coming from, it’s powers are dampened slightly with the real world. Google can’t index everything – at least for now.
Not all is lost, however. With the right tools, analytics makes it pretty easy to monitor your offline marketing efforts. The first of those tools we’ll discuss is a Custom Landing Page.
Custom landing pages should be directed at a very specific clientele that your offline marketing is advertising. For example, if you have a selection of Jazz Fest merchandise, throw that all on a single page under your root domain and focus your offline / traditional advertising, whatever form that may take, on sending people to that custom landing page. Through analytics, you can see how many people ended up there, how long they stayed, etc.
Shortened URLs achieve the same affect with a bit more technological spin. To make this even easier, sign up for a Bitly account, where you can keep track of all the URLs you have shortened. Remember to keep track of what URLs you use for what, and never just duplicate your website – Google will detect it as spam.
Another way to keep track of offline marketing is to use Redirects. You can achieve this with shortened URLs or even QR codes, but a smart way to do this is to buy up some similar domain names that pertain to your business. Let’s say you’re again selling some Jazz Fest merch, and your regular domain name is GiftsInNewOrleans.com. You could buy the domain name BuyJazzFestMerch.com and add it to any offline ad. Have that site redirect to yours. Analytics can track the traffic from that redirect, giving you access to who responded to that offline add. Again, don’t just duplicate your site for the new URL – Google doesn’t play nice with duplicate material.
So, all is not lost when combining traditional and digital marketing. Google Analytics makes it easy to keep track of both, making future marketing efforts even more effective. Saving money, while getting you more business? Who doesn’t want that!
Need help figuring out if your traditional marketing is working? Give us a call at 504-521-6222, or send an email to [email protected], and we’re happy to sit down and figure out a customized solution for your company.
