Offline Marketing Campaigns
Tracking is very important for any marketing campaign. If you fail to track your campaign then it means you fail in your marketing. But tracking the marketing campaigns is not an easy task. Particularly measuring the activity of Offline marketing campaigns is a difficult task. Many people are so confused about how to track offline marketing campaigns such as magazine advertisements, newspaper advertisements, television ads, and others. The costs involved in a direct marketing campaign is less when compared to an Offline marketing campaign. So it becomes necessary to find how it works and what is the Return on Investment from such ads.
The important problem faced by businesses these days is how to track the online results of the offline marketing campaigns. Tracking offline marketing campaigns will help you to connect a marketing segment with a visitor when they enter your site.
We all know the fact that Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking website activities. But most of us do not know the fact that Google Analytics can also be used to track the results of Offline marketing campaigns.
Track Offline Marketing Campaigns with Analytics
In this article, we are going to look at a few ways to track offline marketing promotions through analytics. Let’s get started with it.
1. Offline Marketing Custom Landing Pages
Using Customized landing pages is one of the best method used to track your offline marketing campaigns. These pages are specifically created for your offline marketing business. The people who land on these pages are the ones who have visited their offline marketing advertising. Creating custom landing pages will help you to focus on the main objective of your advertisement and can drive more audience to your offline marketing advertisement.
For example, if you are dealing with sports goods especially for cricket and you place your advertisement in a sports magazine then you can then the custom landing page should concentrate more on your cricket sports goods. This trick will help you to increase your conversion rate. You could also have separate pages for each sport like basketball, football, and others, and have a different URL along with the words mentioning the type of sports. For example hopesportinggoods.com/football, hopesportinggoods.com/cricket, etc.
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This will temp the visitors from your offline marketing ad to type the URL directly into the browser. So you don’t have to create links to these pages on your site. Because of no links to these pages from your site you can get an accurate result of the offline marketing promotions.
To check out the number of visitors who have landed in your custom landing pages go to Content a Site content a Landing Pages. Here you can view the number of visits made and the duration of the visits. You also see the number of conversions using the Goal set menu at the top of the explorer window.
Below mentioned are few ideas to create a proper offline marketing custom landing page
- Create a short URL for the custom landing page – No one will be interested to type a long or complicated URL into the browser. This will make them lose interest in your site.
- Log the URL – Your goal is to track the offline marketing custom landing pages online. So create a lot of custom landing pages. You don’t need to remember which page created for which advertisement.
- Add a noindex meta tag – The main objective is to make sure that these offline marketing custom landing pages are not visible to the search engines. Google will penalize you for having a lot of duplicate content in your site. In order to avoid this add < meta name=“robots” content=”noindex” > to your custom landing page. This will avoid the page being indexed by Google and other search engines. It also lets you do your tracking job with ease.
- Give your phone number – Your visitors to your custom landing pages are from an offline marketing source. So they might not feel comfortable with your site as they feel in online marketing. Because in online marketing we provide contact forms, website details, social media details, and others. So always include your phone number in offline marketing custom landing pages as this will help to increase the conversions.
2. Domain Redirects
Another important method to track your offline marketing promotions is by creating domains specifically to redirect visitors to custom landing pages of your site. Domain redirects let multiple domains to reach your site. For example, if you have a bike service company in various locations in the state of TamilNadu then you can have domains like Hopebikerepair.com, Chennaibikerepair.com, Vellorebikerepair.com, tamilnadubikeservice.com or similar ones. All these domains will redirect the user to the custom landing pages of your website for that particular location.
To create a domain redirect the first step is to purchase that particular domain for your offline marketing promotions. You can purchase domain names that is similar to your existing domain. For example, if you own a clothing company and your website is anusclothing.com then you could buy anusclothings.com, anusclothingTN.com or any similar domain.
Here are few ideas while creating an offline marketing Domain redirects
- Make it easy to remember – When the visitors come across your advertisement they will have only a few moments to read your URL. So make your domain name catchy and something that sticks to the mind easily.
- Avoid creating duplicate websites – When creating redirect domains you might sometimes use the same contents of your main website. But this is the worst thing which can create issues with search engines and your site will be penalized for duplicate content. Ensure that each website you create has unique content.
- Tracking code – When setting the redirect to add the tracking code to the redirect URL so that you can track those domains as well. If you don’t include a tracking code then it will create a 301 redirect which will treat that the actual site does not exist and so the tracking information will not be obtained.
If you use Google Analytics go to their URL builder and follow these steps
- Provide your main website address in the first step
- Provide tagging information in the second step
- Click Submit and enter the resulting URL in the redirect
By doing this when someone visits the URL they will be redirected to the link which has tracking code and as a result, you can track the visitor’s information.
3. Shortened URL’s
Another method to track offline marketing promotion activity is to use shortened URLs. You can use different shortened URLs in your offline marketing campaign. Then you can track each one to find out which URL has made the visitor reach your site. It’s very simple and easy to create shortened URLs.
Using shortened URLs does not require you to create custom landing pages to track the visitors to your site from offline marketing sources. You can just use UTM parameters to track the visitors.
Shortened URLs require more effort as you need to track which URL is related to which marketing piece. Shortened URLs is less professional.
You will not be able to view your results in analytics unless you create the URL tracking in the domain redirect. By doing this when a visitor enters a shortened URL the analytics will assume that the visitor came directly to the site and therefore there will not be any information tracked about these direct visitors.
If you want to use shortened URLs in your offline marketing promotions and at the same time need to track the visitors in the analytics application then use the Google Analytics URL builder to enter the shortened URL.
Here are few ideas listed to use shortened URLs in offline marketing promotions
- Get a custom shortened URL – The main disadvantage of using shortened URL is that there may be spam or similar URLs. You need to preview the URL before launching it. You should create a shortened URL that matches somewhere with the main domain.
- Track your shortened URLs – Google analytics cannot track every visitor on your site. If you add your shortened URLs to the Bitly analytics system then you can get the statistics of the shortened URLs to click through.
4. Discount Codes
Custom discount codes are another method to track offline marketing promotions online. You could see a lot of such discount codes in magazines or newspapers. For example, Use the promo code “Sports15” to get an additional 15% discount on your purchase.
You can create an event called Discount and give the property a Discount code. The values of the property can be different discount codes.
Give each ad a unique discount code so that it will be easy for you to track which discount code is used by the visitors at the checkout process. The organization can have an e-commerce application to generate discount codes. The application should be designed only to track the purchase activity of the visitors who uses such discount codes.
Provided below are few ideas to use discount codes in offline marketing promotion campaigns
- Create a discount code that is easy to remember – if you create a discount code that is easy to remember then people will have no difficulty in using them at the time of their purchase.
- Track your discount code – Record all the discount codes you use using a spreadsheet. It will help you to avoid using a particular discount code repeatedly.
- Publish your discount codes on other sites – You can submit your discount codes on various sites that share online discount codes. This will definitely improve your results. It will help you to track visitors from offline promotion as well as from online sites.
5. Annotations and Direct Traffic
You can also measure the direct traffic to your site using Google Analytics. This is another method to track offline marketing campaigns. Direct traffic in Google analytics shows the traffic derived from visitors who do not come from other online sources.
Direct traffic is one which is derived from people who bookmark their site or directly type their URL into the browser’s address bar. To look at the direct traffic you can go to Traffic Sources à Sources à Direct. This will show you the total amount of direct traffic received by your site.
If you double-click on the dots that appear for a particular date, you can enter a new annotation. Annotation is a note that you enter for your reference in Google Analytics.
You can view your notes next time when you enter the Google Analytics by clicking on the note marker on that date.
Listed below are few ideas to use annotations and direct traffic in offline marketing promotions.
- Track referrals of your website made by others – Direct traffic will help you to find out the offline word of mouth marketing when they mention about your business in any other site or TV or mention it as a reference to any of the friends.
- Compare feature can be used to find out the difference in direct traffic – You can select the data in Google analytics which you need to compare it to previous data. This will help you to compare the results of direct traffic before and after launching the offline marketing campaign.
6. Geographic Data
Finally, if you have targeted an offline marketing promotion towards a specific region, you can find out conversions made from those particular regions. By looking at these conversions you can decide where should you focus the next time when you publish your offline marketing ad. And if some area where you expected more conversions to take place does not give you the expected result then you can take some extra effort in that particular area.
Conclusion
Tracking offline marketing campaigns is a tough job. But it can also be made easy if the right offline marketing strategies and tools are used. There are a number of methods to track offline marketing promotions online. In this article, only a few of the important methods are shared. These methods will help you to get better knowledge about the impact of offline marketing promotions. The more you plan for tracking the offline marketing promotion’s results, the more effectively you can spend your money on marketing.
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