Track Offline Marketing with Google Analytics – Whitepaper

Tracking offline marketing whitepaper

When it comes to tracking offline marketing campaigns, many marketers are unaware of the potential of using their existing web analytics tool to measure success. Typically, the reliance is on traditional, imprecise data such as print distribution figures (a.k.a. readership numbers), viewing figures (TV audience metrics), or footfall metrics (“20,000 people walk pass this sign every day”).

However, none of these metrics can provide any indication of success. That is, was my print, TV, or radio ad successful? Yet, if these readers, viewers or listeners visit your website as a result of exposure to your offline campaign, you can access a rich stream of success metrics. This is a how-to guide to track your offline marketing efforts.

Surprisingly few organisations, or their agencies, are utilising their web analytics data to track offline marketing. Perhaps it is the technical difficulty of understanding “redirection” that is a barrier for marketers, or a lack of awareness of the alternatives. However, there is a clear upside to showing results of an integrated campaign.

In this PDF whitepaper I describe how to use four techniques with Google Analytics – two technical (redirection) and two non-technical – for tracking and measuring the success (or not) of your offline marketing campaigns. It is an adaptation of Chapter 11 from the book – Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.


Download: Tracking Offline Marketing with Google Analytics

 

Please add your feedback on the whitepaper, or your experience of attempting to track offline marketing with a comment below.

Looking for a keynote speaker, or wish to hire Brian…?

If you are an organisation wishing to hire me and my team, please view the Contact page. I am based in Sweden and advise organisations in Europe as well as North America.

You May Also Like…

Sayonara Universal Analytics

Sayonara Universal Analytics

My first Google Analytics data point was 15th May 2005 for UA-20024. If you are of a certain age, that may sound off...

10 Comments

  1. Denver SEO

    You are right, most companies have no clue how to handle their marketing in general, let alone online marketing. Nice pdf tutorial.

    Reply
  2. Greenlattes - Green ideas

    Hi Brian, I bought the Advanced Web Metrics from Amazon.uk for several days ago, and now, I’m still holding it to anywhere I gone. Tracking Offline Marketing with Google Analytics has in the book also.

    However, it quite hard to reading for not native English but I will try with my years of experience.

    Thanks for a grate book.

    DK
    Founder
    @greenlattes

    Reply
  3. Ben Griffiths

    Using redirects to track offline campaigns is very helpful. At my company we take it one step further and use source codes for each campaign that are sent to our CRM system. That way, we have the analytics data, and the data in our CRM system to know what happened to the lead after it left the website.

    Reply
  4. sand

    This whitepaper has some excellent tips that are quite simple to apply. I must say I find it surprising how many marketers forget to plan the route of the potential customer. I think this whitepaper also shows how the marketer can direct the customer to different digital channels so that is not only trackable but also a new touch point to show them more, or deeper information. Thank you!

    Reply
  5. trobet

    thanks for the quick reply, Brian! By the way, your book (paper) is on my bed side table, and has helped me enormously in many occasions. I read a few others, and yours is in my view way ahead of the pack. I just regret that it’s entirely based on the synchronous version of the GATC when all my sites are using the asynchronous version. Any plan to “upgrade” it?
    Tanguy

    Reply
    • Brian Clifton

      Trobet – you highlight the difficulty of writing a book for such a fast moving product….! I completed the writing before he async code was launched.

      That said, the async version is simply an innovative way of installing the ga.js code. Therefore the vast majority of the book content (with the exception of the specific code shown in Chapters 6 and 7) remain very relevant. BTW, check out the new Pro Lounge area for updates…

      Reply
  6. trobet

    Intersting article. However, it does not solve my problem completely and I wonder if you could point me to the right direction: say my main website is http://www.mysite.com and I am running a campaign in a print magazine using a vanity URL http://www.vanitysite.com. I did a 301 redirect from vanitysite.com to mysite.com with appended campaign parameters, and this is working fine. My problem is this: my magazine is also mentioning a number of deep pages, eg. http://www.vanitysite.com/article1 which should redirect to http://www.mysite.com/article1. My redirect fails as it appends the campaign parameters BEFORE the /article1, and thus all my deep pages redirect to the home page of mysite.com…
    I’d really apreciate any bit of advice !
    Thanks

    Reply
    • Brian Clifton

      Trobet – pass this information to your webmaster/sys admin (the people that look after your server). Its a straight forward issue that is specific to your system. If you want further info on how to setup redirects yourself, the Apache mod_rewrite is an excellent resource: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html

      Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Share This