Google Analytics is the most popular and widely used web analytics tool in the world. In its infancy it was a largely unremarkable free tool that gave you some general information about the amount of visitors to your site and their activity. Over time, however, Google Analytics added more and more enterprise level functionality and drove many paid analytics services out of business. While many small companies have implemented Google Analytics and regularly keep up on their traffic trends, a lot of contractors and small businesses are unaware that Google Analytics can also be very helpful in measuring the success of their online marketing campaigns as well as offline advertising in TV, radio and newspapers.
Track offline campaigns with vanity URLs
This is one of the easiest ways to track offline advertising within Google Analytics. All you really need to do is create a vanity URL (a type of custom URL that exists to help users remember and find a specific page of your website) and a new page with your special offer and promotion – then check the traffic to your page in Google Analytics under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
You’ve likely watched an advertisement on television before where you can receive a special deal by going to an easy to remember webpage like “thebestdealever.com/tv”. Usually, when you go to the company website you won’t find that /tv page anywhere within the normal site navigation. The idea here is that the only traffic to this page will be from people who see the ad and type in the URL directly. If the /tv page was available within the site’s navigation, it would be getting clicks from people who came into the site from other locations and it would be much harder to accurately measure the traffic your ad was sending to your site.
No need for a unique landing page? No problem.
Not every offline or online campaign requires a unique landing page, but how can you measure how much traffic is being sent to a specific page on your existing site through online or offline advertising? The answer’s only a little more complicated than our first example. All you’ll need is a vanity URL, a 301 redirect and the Google URL Builder.
Let’s walk through a tangible example. Let’s say we at JobFLEX want to run a radio campaign that promotes our painting cost estimator software, where we already have an existing page at http://job-flex.com/painting-cost-estimator. The URL is too long for the average person to remember in the radio spot, but we don’t want to build a new page, either, since the one we have suits our needs just fine. Here we’ll create a URL using Google’s URL Builder to generate a code so Google Analytics will track traffic to this page as a campaign. Just fill out the following fields in the tool and then click generate URL:
- Website URL: http://job-flex.com/painting-cost-estimator (this tells Google what page you want the visitor to go to)
- Campaign Source: WRDO (this will show up as the Source of your campaign in Google Analytics – WRDO is the fictitious radio station where we’ll be running our ad)
- Campaign Medium: Radio (this will show up as the Medium of your campaign in Google Analytics – since this will be a radio ad we’ll tag it as such)
- Campaign Content: Ad 1 (if you have multiple ads you can name them here, so in Google Analytics you’ll be able to differentiate the behavior between different ads you run within a campaign)
- Campaign Name: Paint (since we’re promoting our painting software, any ads we run to this page within our campaign can be grouped together under the “Paint” campaign and seen as an aggregate within Google Analytics)
The URL that the URL builder generates from the above is: http://job-flex.com/painting-cost-estimator?utm_source=WRDO&utm_medium=Radio&utm_content=Ad%201&utm_campaign=Paint
If you click this ad it will take you to our painting estimator page. Every item in the URL from the ? onward just feeds Google Analytics data about where you’re coming from. This is the destination we want to get users to, but how do we get someone from the radio to type in that big, ugly URL? The truth is we don’t have to.
Most content management systems allow you an easy way to create a 301 redirect. What’s a 301 redirect? In simple terms, it drives a user from the URL they’ve input to their browser to another URL of your choosing. So, in this case, it would be easier if our radio ad told users to go to an easy to remember vanity URL like http://job-flex.com/radio and then use a 301 redirect to make any user who tries to access that URL actually end up on our tracking URL of http://job-flex.com/painting-cost-estimator?utm_source=WRDO&utm_medium=Radio&utm_content=Ad%201&utm_campaign=Paint where Google Analytics will record that information and you can view the results for your campaign under Acquisition > Campaigns. Go ahead and click the /radio link above to see exactly how this works.
Obviously, these methods can be used for any number of marketing endeavors to measure their success. From email marketing, to banner ads, to newspaper ads, either one of these techniques will allow you to gain some very clear metrics on how well your campaigns are performing.
