Have you wondered how offline
campaigns like TV, radio and newspaper ads impact the online traffic? Can this
impact be measured? In Web Analytics 2.0 [1], Avinash discusses some options
that can be used to capture the relevant metrics. Below are the few tips from
his book.
Metrics such as number of
visits/clicks or the conversion rate increase/decrease due to an offline ad
campaign can measure the impact on the website. For example, what is likeliness
of clicking your company banner on a website after the user saw the ad campaign
on TV or in a newspaper and can this be measured.
Useful web analytics data can be
obtained only with customer’s primary key, which is not readily available and
one might need to adopt few work around methods to obtain it. Refer to Occam
Razor blog for better understanding of the primary key. Using vanity URLs
(also known as redirects) is the oldest trick in the trade to obtain this data.
Vanity URLs or the redirects are short and easy to remember web addresses when
entered in the URL links to the original site’s address. For illustration
purpose, the vanity URL for my blog (if I had one) will be www.websitedoesnotexist.com/~yellai
instead of www.websitedoesnotexist.com/1256789/2013.
When you run an ad in newspaper, you will print the vanity URL of the company
instead of its actual address. When the user visits the company site using the
vanity URL, web analytics tools can be used to track the customer information. Since,
this vanity URL is printed is newspaper/TV ads, one can track what the
conversion rate is for these channels. To get better granularity, vanity URLs should
have a tracking parameter. For example, an ad in Sunday Times can have
parameter tracker called sundaytimes in its URL which make the URL to look
something like this www.websitedoesnotexist.com/sundaytimes.
(image ref. http://www.datareign.com/category/social-media/google-plus)
One can go to the advertiser's site and locate the product on the website by simply entering the unique code which is again tied to catalog’s geographic location, edition of the catalog, etc.
Based on the entered code, the company will be able collect the user information pertaining to location and other details. This will help the company to identify locations that are interested in buying the product and also the channel to market to potential customers.
In addition to the above two
methods, surveys can be used to find the impact of channel to generate the
website traffic. Basically, a survey is sent out with questions like where did
they hear about the company or the special offer. This data can be used to
generate the website traffic metrics.
The last one is to correlate the
website traffic patterns with time of the offline ad campaign. For example, one
can correlate website traffic patters such as spikes, trends to a Super bowl ad
campaign or a print ad in a famous news magazine.
As mentioned before, these simple
tips can provide great insights into the impact an offline ad campaign is
creating on your website, like the conversion ratio for radio vs. TV vs.
newspaper ads. This information greatly helps marketing professionals to focus
on the right channel to reach their target customers.
Reference:
1. Web
Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer
Centricity (Kindle edition), Avinash Kaushik
2. http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/tracking-offline-conversions-hope-seven-best-practices-bonus-tips/
That's informative. Never really concentrated on the vanity URLs.. just considered them as normal website URLs. It makes more sense now that I am getting to know what it will be used for. :-)
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