Capture Value from Offline Advertising, Part 2: Analyzing the Ads

Using offline advertising to drive customers to your website requires a variety of tools to measure the campaign’s success.

In , we explained how a business can create offline ads with destination URLs that direct clients to a Web page. The next step is learning how to measure the performance of these ads.  

There are two simple ways a small business can harness the traffic data once the ads are in place:

Destination URLs

When you insert a URL into a print ad, brochure, or any other printed material, it can direct viewers to a specific landing page rather than your website home page. This landing page should explain the offer you are promoting. You want to be sure this is a different page from your main site so that interest in the offer can be analyzed. This method is useful for very simple campaigns. Limit it to using just two or three separate ads to drive visitors to this landing page. If you are running several ads from more than two or three sources, it becomes difficult to determine which ad platforms work the best.

Tracking Links

You can improve the process of connecting an offline ad to a landing page through a destination URL by adding a tracking link to the URL. This link permits deeper visitor measurement of audience response by campaign and medium type. Each link description has a value assigned to it. Most Web analytics tools provide a link builder. Google has a builder for a single campaign. Yahoo Web Analytics has a builder for multiple campaigns. The following are typical link descriptions:

• Source: This identifies where the original ad appears.
• Medium: This describes the kind of ad being used, whether it is a banner ad, a pay-per-click ad from another website, a print ad, a billboard, and so on.
• Campaign: This is simply the name of the campaign. Name it whatever you like, but it helps to use the name of the product, slogan, or season so you can more easily keep track of the campaign.

explains how connecting an analytics solution to an offline ad allows your marketing team to see how accurately and frequently an ad drives interested visitors to your website. By organizing your sources of offline and online advertising into one experience, your marketing team can quickly discover the right offer that satisfies visitors.