Track Offline Marketing ROI Using Google Analytics

Are you getting any ROI from your offline marketing efforts, or are you making business decisions based on how you feel about a campaign’s success? There is a better way to measure marketing efforts. Let me show you how.

In a previous post, I provided a very simple way to track offline marketing efforts: using a landing page with any form of web analytics on it. However, there is a better solution, which leads to clearer attribution and flexibility.

The best way to track the ROI of offline marketing efforts is to set up a redirect to a page with URL tracking codes. Here’s how to set this up on a website that uses Google Analytics (your directions will vary if you use another analytics package, but you could do something similar).

Step 1: Build your tracking URL

Go to the Google URL builder (https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/) and enter the information you want to use to distinguish your offline marketing campaign. The URL builder requires a couple of pieces of information, so this will require some foresight in your overall offline marketing efforts.

First of all, ask yourself: When someone comes to your website, what do you want them to do? Do you want them to call you? Do you want them to find your store? Do you want to generate a sales lead?

Once you know that, the next question is: What page will make it easiest for your prospect to accomplish that goal? You might have a “Contact Us” page with a phone number or directions. You might not—but you probably should—so build a new page (that will help your latest campaign and overall marketing campaign). You’ll place this URL in the “Website URL” field in the URL builder.

What is your Campaign Source?

Think of this as your broad category of marketing. For instance, if you’re hoping to measure your trade show efforts throughout the year, this might be “tradeshow”. If you’re hoping to measure the effect of some of the free swag you give away, you might call it “swag.” Think big picture here- what’s a broad category that applies to these kinds of marketing efforts?

What is your Campaign Medium?

Think of your medium as a sub-category for your marketing efforts. For instance, if you’re tracking the efforts of a Trade Show, you might have one medium for the “brochure” you hand out from your booth and another medium for the “banner” displayed in the conference hall. If you’re tracking the benefits of your swag, you could have one medium for “tshirt” and another as “mousepad”.

What is your Campaign Name?

This is where you’d name the specific offline marketing channel. If you’re presenting at the American B2B Marketing Association Annual Meeting this year, you might call this “a-b2b-2015” or something similar to distinguish when it was shared.

Technical Details

Keep this in mind when deciding the campaign values:

• For these values, try to stick with one-word phrases. “Tradeshow” is better than “Trade Show.”
• Consistency is key. Once you use “TradeShow,” you must use that value for that dimension. Even upper and lower case matter here.

Once you know your campaign values, enter them along with your destination URL into the Google URL builder, and you’ll receive a tracking URL.

If you need additional information, here’s a more in-depth explanation of Google’s URL Builder.

Step 2: Set up a redirect.

The tracking URL is full of confusing parameters and very specific. You would not want to publish this URL on a t-shirt or announce it in a radio ad. Now is where you need to set up a URL redirect. Have your web developer set up a redirect from a more user-friendly URL to your more cumbersome tracking URL. The user-friendly URL should be extremely short and cannot be for an existing page on your site. Consider the medium: if it’s going in a radio ad, make sure it’s clearly understood if read aloud; if it’s on a banner, make sure it’s memorable.

Step 3: Test it!

Once you have a redirect, test it. If your user-friendly URL is yourwebsite.com/radio then type that into a browser.

• Do you end up on the desired destination page? If not, make sure your web team sets up the URL correctly.
• Does the page render correctly, or is it broken? Some websites don’t handle tracking URLs very nicely.
• When you go into Google Analytics, does this visit record with the source/medium you intended?

The point is, before printing your user-friendly URL on thousands of mousepads, ensure it works!

Step 4: Publish it

Once everything’s working right, publish your offline content using your new, user-friendly URL. Print one on your banner, another URL on your t-shirt, and use another in your radio ad. As long as you’ve set up your tracking URL, you’ll be able to see the ROI of each of these efforts in your Google Analytics account.

Here’s the cool part: this is flexible. You can reuse these user-friendly URLs but change the attribution for different events. For instance, if you’re taking the same banner to different conferences, you can keep the same URL on the banner (yourwebsite.com/start-today) but change the redirect to point to a different tracking URL with a different campaign name for each conference. You don’t have to reprint the banner, but you can see the value of your banner at each event!