While I love online marketing and often times think that is a much better marketing investment than offline marketing and advertising, offline ads are important and add value. While we are going to see budget shift significantly from offline efforts to online campaigns, there is still going to be a ton of money going into offline ads.
Much of the value from offline advertising is actually online and is typically attributed to the direct channel. If an ad gives out a website URL, they almost always send visitors to their homepage. When ads don't give users a website to go to, typically one of the search channels will receive credit for the value created by the ad. The KTM ad below is a prime example of a print ad that will create value, but the value will be attributed to either the search channel or direct channel if the user is already aware of (or simply searches for) the URL for KTM.
As you can see below, in 2012 82% of ad-spend was offline; that is a lot of visitors and conversions that aren't being properly attributed.
This isn't just a problem for companies with big ad budgets. In fact, this is more important for small businesses with smaller budgets because often times these expenses come out of the owner's pockets. Real estate agents are probably the best example of why this is so important. If my friend Hailey is a real estate agent and if she wants to market her self and her properties, she has a lot of options. She could advertise on a big real estate site like Zillow, a niche site, through SEO or PPC, and it's easy for her to track leads from these. It gets harder, though, when she invests in offline efforts like signs, door hangers, print ads, or any other form of offline advertising. Hailey, and almost all real estate agents, are doing their marketing campaigns on a tight budget, so it is critical for real estate agents (and professionals in many other industries) to understand exactly what is producing value and what isn't.
The good news is that it's actually pretty easy to figure out which offline ads are helping you and which ones aren't doing anything.
Create a custom URL for your ads
The first step is to either buy a vanity domain or to create a unique landing page for each offline effort.
Depending on your niche and ad, it can be important to incentivize the user typing in the full URL (and not just stopping once they type in the homepage) if you are not going to use a vanity domain. This can mean offering the user a special promotion or gift. You would want to reinforce the offer with the URL as well, using something like /free-gift or /special-promo.
Set up redirects and campaign parameters
Once you've created your vanity domain or landing page, you'll need to set up a 301 redirect to the page you want visitors to land on (your home page or a specific landing page) AND include Google Analytics campaign parameters (shown below by ?utm=*)
If you're not super familiar with Google Analytics, this guide is a good starting point. If you need help creating the campaign URL, the Google URL Builder and GA Config are really useful tools. Keep in mind, while there are five different parameters you can use, the following three are required at minimum:
- Source – This should be the specific source of the ad and referral such as "Seattle Times," "For Sale Sign," "Flier," etc. The source parameter will allow you to assign conversions to a specific source.
- Medium – The medium is simply the high-level channel that your effort is part of. Some examples of good mediums would be radio, magazine ad, or TV. When you consistently use the medium attribution parameter, over time, you will be able to see what high-level channels produce the best ROI for you.
- Campaign name – The campaign name should refer to specific campaign you are running. You can use this to pull together ads across mediums and sources that are part of a larger campaign, or you can differentiate between different campaigns within the same source.
Track your ROI
At this point, you've done all the hard work and have everything set up for Google Analytics to be able to track visitors coming to the site from your ads as well as how many people convert in some form. You will be able to find the number of visitors from your ads under the campaigns tab in Google Analytics, and the number of conversions in the Ecommerce, Goals, or Events tab depending on how you are tracking your conversions.
The campaign view in Google Analytics is where you'll monitor the success of your offline campaigns.
With this in place you will be able to better invest your offline marketing budget knowing that the channels and campaigns are going to give you the best online ROI.
There are a few key points that I'd like to make here.....
1. Vanity domains are usually more problematic than they are a viable solution, especially if you're promoting a brand. It doesn't make sense to be pushing traffic to vanitydomain.com on the radio if you've invested heavily into loseweight.com. The last thing you need, is to cause confusion amongst your prospects, which is what vanity domains generally tend to do.
2. For those that DO consider a vanity domain, ALWAYS check that there aren't any "similar" domains pointing to other sites. The last thing you need is to invest into an offline marketing campaign, only to find you've driven a stack of traffic to a completely non related url, or worse - a competitor.
3. Setting 301 redirects isn't really necessary. If you intend on driving traffic to a specific landing page (yourdomain.com/special-offer) - just track uniques to THAT page.
4. Most times, people ignore the landing page, and go straight to the root domain. That's a behaviour that's beyond your control - there's not a great deal you can do about that, EXCEPT unless of course you HAVE THE USER PERFORM AN ACTION once they hit your site. The best way to do this is to have them use a coupon code or a discount code or something that pushes them to a dedicated "thank you" page. This "ties off" the process and makes it easy to track. What's powerful is that you can use multiple coupon codes per promotional channel/medium.
I don't think it creates brand confusion - you can use a vanity domain alongside branding and create a cohesive message and experience. That said, I think the URL should reflect the intent of the ad. If it's to drive customers to a certain offer, I think the vanity URL is fine; if it is to create brand awareness then you'd probably want to use the homepage.
"I don't think it creates brand confusion"...
Of course it does.
The majority of people only remember the url. If they hear, "cheaphotels.com.au" on the radio, that's what they type in - that's what they remember. Most couldn't care less about the brand. They just want the offer.
It would be foolish for any sizable company to consider potentially sabotaging themselves with a vanity domain if they've invested heavily towards promoting their brand (along with their domain name).
1. I disagree - many HUGE brands rely on vanity URLs to hold specific campaigns. Not sure whether this is relevant outside of the UK but the telecoms provider 02 has seen huge success with the Be More Dog campaign (bemoredog.com, which 301 redirects to https://bemoredog.o2.co.uk/).
2. A good point.
3. 301s ensure you push all traffic to your main domain and also ensue your don't lose any SEO value, as well as being able to track traffic. Surely a redirect is a no-brainer?
4. The incentive that Geoff noted should help push people to the specified sub-directory. I would suggest web users are savvy enough now to know the difference. Although, I'd love to read the data that says "Most times, people ignore the landing page," (that wasn't sarcastic, I actually would).
The subject is interesting, but the links above to Hailey and Zillow are totally unnecessary which makes it to lose some credibility and makes me question the real intent of the post.
I can't help but agree. I wonder whether Geoff works on a couple of property related SEO accounts? :)
This is definitely a great way to directly attribute web activity to offline marketing activities. However, I think its important to note that this will just be a sample of the real response, not the entire audience. Which is fine, its better than being completely in the dark. But, if you believe that's the entire response, you'll undervalue your offline campaigns.
Here are some other customer reactions, some of them can still be attributed easily, others not so much:
1. A google search for the offer mentioned - you can make sure there is a page indexed organically for whatever you're calling this offer as well as run a paid ad to pick properly direct any of those offer searchers. Include both when looking at ROI.
2. A generic search for your brand name or a direct load - a lot of people won't remember the vanity URL/domain and they won't remember what you called the offer. They'll remember your brand and hit your site with a brand search term or a direct load to your domain. The only way to quantify this is by doing controlled experimentation and measuring the increase in this kind of traffic.
3. An offline response - doesn't matter how many times you say online only or only available at this domain, if your company has an offline presence, people will try to redeem it offline. 800 numbers, store visits, etc. Make sure your reps have a means of attributing that promotion to an order and you'll be able to pick up even more orders to include.
Good post though, good walk through of analytics & URL/domain redirecting, I just think its important to mention that its only a sample.
Hey Dave,
Good points. Especially that this won't capture all the value, but I think that it's a good starting point. Unfortunately with your second point, Google no longer provides any keyword data so it will only be useful for Bing searches. Mongoose metrics is a great way to handle your third point - you can easily have different phone numbers for different ads and efforts.
Nice article Geoff and thanks for mentioning Mongoose in your comment to Dave. As you said, call tracking is useful way of capturing any offline conversions and attributing them to the proper offline advertising campaign. Depending on your business, industry or audience device preference, calls may make up a decent portion of overall lead volume.
Tracking numbers can be integrated directly into your ads, as well as throughout your landing page and website. Any conversions captured can even be fed into other tracking platforms, like Google Analytics, to show both offline and online lead conversion data together in the same reports.
I had one suggestion regarding the UTM parameters step. It's a good idea to adopt a clear, and consistent naming convention. I've seen these reports get very convoluted as new campaigns are rolled out and new descriptions are used for medium, source and campaign.
I would agree with the Call Tracking. Some sites allow you to include the call tracking source that can be integrated into your website with a JavaScript code.
Geoff, as with everything else in SEO these days the natural search would have to be measured more with the landing page than the term. Thanks for clarifying.
To hit the "coupon specific" terms, you'd need a landing page dedicated to that and could track those entering the site via that page. The "generic" terms would be entering via home page or other.
Agreed, this is an excellent starting point and it gets clients/companies thinking of how to attribute more and more, which leads them to some of the methods we've just discussed.
Thanks for the article, it hits a criminally underaddressed topic.
Great point here. Before keyword data was not provided, we could simply look at how many users were entering our site via branded keyword term. For example, a 200% increase in people finding "Bob's Boots" via the keyword "Bob's Boots" running parallel to an offline campaign could mean your campaign is working.
Also, it's important to make your calls to action as compelling as possible. I've never studied it, but I'd be willing to bet that the call to action in a radio ad "Google Bob's Boots to learn more" would generate more activity than "Visit BobsBootsOhio.com"
I would be tempted to buy an easy to remember domain with the ad slogon and 301 it to a specific landing page. I would do that because you may loose prospects on something like example.com/specialoffers opposed to www.get.it (assuming the domain is available)
Good point, David. It is important to make it as easy as possible for users to enter a specific URL. Therefore I suggest using shortened URLs that are easy to memorize, like short.nr/promo.
I agree, I tend to like the vanity domain better than a landing page, but this depends a bit on the type of ad you're running. If you're doing print/radio, definitely do a vanity domain. If you're doing print such as a newspaper or magazine, a landing page could work as people have the ability to hang onto the ad.
Hello Geoff,
It is a nice Idea to track offline marketing activities, but an advertiser for a small company which have limited budget may face many problems when using this method.
the most important problem is how to convince customer to type the URL, he needs a reasonable offer which increase the cost of marketing, in addition to the great cost of offline media.
Sure, you have to convince someone to go to your URL, but you're going to face that issue regardless of what the URL is. If you're going to invest in offline media, you should try and track how many people come to your site though, right?
Hi Geoff,
Nice Post! These are best ways to track offline Advertising. But i have seen people after reading advertisement in newspaper or listening on radio do not type url but just do search on search engine. In that case it becomes really tough to track offline advertising. Hope we could get any solution for that as well.
This is exactly the problem we're seeing. Case in point is an offline campaign, where we had ads in newspapers with a clear custom link: shopname.com/newspapername. We saw a very limited amount of users visiting the custom url, while there was a definite and discernible increase in visitors on the actual page the custom url redirected to - most people visiting our site via shopname.com and then just clicking through, or finding us via google. I feel the only real way to somewhat judge the effectiveness of print campaigns is to work with baselines and estimate the added effect of the print ad, and distribute the visitors and conversions that are extra across all ads using the distribution key you see for users that DID use the custom urls (provided you have different custom urls per ad/newspaper).
Yes this best you can do in case of offline campaign. But suppose your newspaper Ad is so attractive that leads in readers remembering Ur website name and when they need that service they searched on Google and land on your site and take service from you. In these cases we never know that we got business due to newspaper ad, and think we got it from Google search.
Another option I've used with a restaurant client in the past is using the vanity url in conjunction with an offer or discount/promo code. This incentives the reader to use the vanity url provided. Def not a novel idea, but very effective none-the-less.
It's a tough situation as Google isn't providing keyword data anymore, but you can review organic visits to the landing page and look at conversions based off that traffic. That is essentially what you are doing with a campaign, but adding the tracking parameters makes it show up as a campaign which is a bit easier to analyze and compare. Other than that, there really aren't a lot of other options besides comparing your overall traffic/conversions to baselines and adjust for seasonality.
This is definitely not the strongest way of doing it but could still work. If you just rolled out a newspaper/radio ad, you can modify your homepage (just a bit) to point visitors to the supposed landing page for the ad (guide them to what they're looking for). Then on the landing page, you can ask visitors (maybe via a drop-down) to specify how they found your site (i.e. via newspaper, radio, etc.).
Downside: I really won't touch the homepage as much as possible. Furthermore, hopefully the visitors would care to specify how they found the site.
Nice complimentary post to latest white board Friday.
Great post thanks for sharing very important information. These important points will help us in the long life.
This concept is huge for businesses large and small. I work mostly in lead gen and having the ability to track what channel initiated or assisted the conversion is gold. Instead of a redirect to the home page I would make that page/vanity-domain a dedicated landing page for that ad campaign. Maintaining scent throughout the ad, url/vanity-domain, and landing page is key to conversion. After all, we are trying to make money and see what channel influenced the sale/lead so we can adjust the budget accordingly. I'm a big fan of call tracking companies like mongoose metrics and call rail too. Some ads educate enough that people want to pick up the phone there and then so having dedicated call tracking numbers will help. Another option to track leads is by adding a "how did you hear about us" section in the checkout/lead form. Then the customer can select radio, tv, or whatever offline or online channel that directed them to the site. Thanks for tips, it was a great post and I would love to see more like these!
Great article on offline advertising, but I would stick to the point mentioned in the comments above that it is quite difficult to bring your target audience specifically to your website as they never remember the exact urls.
Great article from Avinash covers a lot of ground:
https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/brand-measurement-analytics-metrics-branding-campaigns/
Geoff,
Have you ever ran a QR code in conjunction with a vanity URL on print advertising (magazines, newspaper, etc) and then compared data? I especially like using the vanity URL if you can utilize a slogan or motto of a company as the vanity URL something that people who are familiar with the brand would recognize. Simple example would be Justdoit.com in conjunction with a Nike which many users would be able to recognize and remember, or for KTM readytorace.com
Hey Jared, I think you're right, if you can connect the vanity URL to your branding you'll be much more successful. I haven't had great success with QR codes in the past - maybe it's just me, but when I've used them I feel like people have opted into typing in the URL over scanning the QR code. I guess it depends how long the URL is :-)
Really simple, yet important post, Geoff. I actually made a comment about this in the Whiteboard Friday blog post… vanity domains/URL is really the only way I've known how to track offline advertising. Thanks for the easy-to-understand breakdown.
Hi Geoff, you gave a nice idea for a business which is capable of spending large amount in advertising. and Firas raised an interesting point about small businesses advertising. I agree with him because offline ads are paid ads and time limited, once link time expires ad becomes useless. That not going to lead to any web traffic. We have a new service for smartphones named iSMARTsecure. Can anyone please elaborate the scope of offline advertising in building the brand?
Geoff it's pretty good article. I believe that online advertising have given the concept of offline advertising a backseat! What do you say on this point?
Most businesses don't have a need for this level of tracking but it might be useful to some to understand where you can take this approach to, following is how Mantra Group rolls when we're campaigning to win.
At the beginning of a campaign, we'll specify a campaign name to use in Google Analytics and it gets used across all activity vigilantly which yields two major benefits:
Within each different channel that we advertise into, we'll put in place different tools to measure the effectiveness of that ad spend. For example, if we're going out to several newspapers or several magazines across the campaign, they'll all have their own unique URL as Geoff suggests - which redirect internally to a landing page but with Google Analytics campaign tracking.
This approach then allows us to use utm_source to differentiate between different newspapers/magazines/.. to work out which ones deliver the best return on investment. If you wanted to you could use different vanity URLs for different ads in different sections of the same newspaper, redirecting with unique campaign tracking as you go. If we're using display advertising on the same newspapers websites as an integrated media buy, we'll re-use the campaign name, medium, source and differentiate between sections of their site and ad creative using utm_content.
To help tie bows around more of the traffic, offline media will also use promotional codes assigned to the different placements in a similar fashion to what I mentioned above with several newspaper or magazines using unique URLs, those same ads will also include a unique promotional code that we'll assign against each transaction so that even if a user finds our websites off the back of organic search or a channel with different campaign tracking (ie, a non-campaign paid search ad) - we still get to see that revenue attributed to the campaign.
Working in the hotel industry, people love to pick up the phone as well - so of course that needs to be contended with as well. We take a similar approach by assigning different phone numbers to different pieces of advertising to gauge how many calls came through each channel but we don't often go down to the placement level for phone numbers. We're lucky that the Cisco phone system we use includes call volume statistics and while we don't tie phone numbers to actual transactions - we know the call centre conversion rate and average order value over the campaign period so can estimate return on investment through different channels.
When more detailed phone tracking is needed than the pure call volumes, we'll lease numbers from a phone call statistics company like Jet Interactive. These guys provide very detailed reporting on the calls that come into each number, not quite Google Analytics level but very detailed and if you lease enough numbers - you can tie that back to keyword data as an example (not useful for organic anymore but still helpful for paid search).
The key to making this approach work for you is planning, you need to have all of your media in a spreadsheet and breakdown the tracking chunk by chunk so you can adequately separate different pieces where required while still maintaining the ability to roll it up into larger sections of traffic.
I hope that helps everyone interested in understanding how far you can take this approach to better understand mixed media campaigns, so you can easily see what works and doesn't work for you moving forward.
Hey Alistair, I disagree - I think all businesses, especially the smaller ones, need this level of tracking for their marketing efforts. Regardless of the size of your budget, you need to know what's producing ROI for you.
Phone tracking is a great point and something I skipped over here. I really like using phone tracking on everything from print ads to A/B testing landing pages. I like Mongoose Metrics but will look into Jet Interactive.
I've worked for an ecommerce company where we've used a vanity domain to track offline campaigns, the vanity URL served as both a link shortener and for campaign tracking.
Making sure you have a memorable short URL that compliments your brand will help incentivize the users to type it in because firstly it's shorter than typing in your full URL (in most cases anyway, probably not in KTM's case however), and if you have an offer in your campaign it will further encourage users to type in that URL as they might feel that they will not get the offer when going straight to your home page.
It does not have to cost any more than the domain renewal every year, there is a free tool called yourls (https://yourls.org/) that you can install on your own servers. I've used linktrackr (https://ww3.linktrackr.com/) which offer a great amount of reporting and also doesn't cost much at all. At the ecommerce company I worked for we only had the basic plan which was enough.
There is no way of guaranteeing that all your users will use the links you provide in your offline campaings, but if enough people do, it can still give you some insightful and actionable data to work with.
Thanks Tom, good points. Definitely having an offer and making the domain memoriable will go a long way.
That's pretty cool way Geoff, making use of vanity domain or different URLs for different channels can really give you decent data to analyze.
Good article but -
I don't understand why you are 301'ing to include a tracking parameter, in my opinion you are either better off leaving them on the page (and adding tracking to the code) and no-index,follow the page OR redirecting with a 302 to include the tracking parameter.... ? Add a canonical back to the same landing page you use for SEO (as you would for PPC)
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/methods/gaJSApiCampaignTracking#_gat.GA_Tracker_._setCampMediumKey
Nice post...