Digital and online marketing is now very much a part of everyday life for anyone marketing their business in 2021, but offline marketing and promotions are still very real and very powerful strategies employed by almost every business. However, this poses a bit of a conundrum: one of the major reasons digital marketing is so appealing is the vast power of data tracking and the ability to objectively measure and follow the customer journey. With offline marketing, there’s often so much faith required: you create a promotion to the best of your abilities, then sort of just… cross your fingers hoping that you’ll see some positive results. So is there a way to utilize the data tracking benefits of digital marketing platforms to make your offline promotions less of a guessing game?
Offline Marketing, Digital Data Collection
The answer is: yes! With a little bit of creative problem solving, it’s actually quite simple to use your Google Analytics platform to track the efficacy of your offline marketing events, whether they be radio/tv ads, direct mail, billboards, or more. The simplest way to do this is by using custom URLs to track offline marketing efforts separately from online campaigns. This can be done easily with just a few different steps, and we’ll walk you through each one.
Step 1: Create a Custom (Vanity) URL
As someone who engages in marketing work, you may have heard the term “Vanity URL” thrown around before. This has nothing to do with beauty or ego, however: it’s just a name used for custom URLs that you create to track a specific marketing campaign. Say you’re a plumbing company that has a booth at a construction convention, and you’re handing out flyers to try and get people to sign up for your email list. You might create a simple, memorable custom vanity URL (say, “www.plumbingforever.com/ConstructionCon2021” ) and put that on your flyers and promotional materials at the convention so that when people see your promotions, they go on their phones and put in the URL (or link from something like a QR code for even more seamless functionality). Or, if you’d prefer an even shorter, snappier, more memorable URL, you can always purchase a totally unique domain name for the marketing campaign that can forward to your website, ex www.plumbingforeverCC.com. (we’ll cover link forwarding in one of the next steps).
Step 2: Create a Custom Landing Page for Your URL
When someone follows your vanity URL, they should be brought to a unique page on your website that has content relevant to your marketing purposes. So if you want people to sign up for your email list, it may have a sign-up form. Or if you’re hoping for people to watch an explanatory video, you’ll have that video embedded on this page. One important note, however, is that you want to do everything you can to limit access to this page to only those who already have the link. This means you’ll want to add a no index meta tag to your landing page so that it doesn’t appear in Google searches, because any traffic from outside your offline promotion will muddy the data you hope to collect.
Step 3: Build a Campaign URL
Google Analytics is all about tracking campaigns, but unfortunately, your custom vanity URL will not provide the Google Analytics campaign tracking info by default. This means that you’ll need to build a unique campaign URL using UTM parameters, which is accomplished quickly and easily using Google’s Campaign URL Builder tool. On this page, you’ll plug in your vanity URL along with other information–like campaign name, source, etc–to help you identify your campaign in your Google Analytics reporting. Once you’ve entered all the necessary info, the tool will spit out a new URL, but one that is much too complex to put on a flyer (think something like “www.plumbingforever.com/ConstructionCon2021/?utm_source=ConstructionConFlyer&utm_medium=offline&utm_campaign=ConstructionCon2021”–you know, easy to remember!). So for the next step, we’ll need to solve this issue.
Step 4: Redirect Your Vanity URL to Your Campaign URL
To address this issue of an unwieldy campaign URL extension, you’ll need to set up an automatic redirect from your simple vanity URL to your trackable campaign URL. You’ll be using a 301 redirect to make sure that anybody who types in your vanity URL is automatically transferred to the webpage with your campaign URL, so their info can be tracked. If you aren’t a web developer, this can be a bit daunting, but most common website platforms (Squarespace, WordPress, etc) will have either detailed instructions on how to set up a redirect or support easy-to-use plugins to create the redirect for you.
Step 5: Test Your Campaign
Last but certainly not least, you’ll want to go through the whole process yourself as both a business operator and as a potential customer. Print out a test flyer and make sure the URL is legible/memorable or that any QR codes work properly to bring you to your vanity URL landing page. As you land on the page, make sure you’re being properly redirected to the Campaign URL so that the data is being tracked And as you do all this, use Google Analytics’ real-time reporting tool to verify that the whole process is working as intended. Spending a few minutes testing ensures that you don’t put all this effort into your campaign only to end up with zero trackings because of some minor error.
Is Offline Tracking with Google Analytics Worth It?
Since the dawn of the industry, the holy grail for marketers has been a way to objectively measure the results of any given marketing campaign. Digital marketing offers much of this capability, but it’s remained elusive for offline marketing efforts. By working through these steps, you’ll finally have a way to track your offline marketing events with much of the same objective measurement as you do your digital marketing promotions.
Tracking offline marketing efforts via Google Analytics can be hugely important for ensuring that your marketing dollars aren’t going to waste on ineffective offline campaigns, and we think it’s well worth your attention. But if you don’t have the time or energy to handle it yourself, Skol Marketing’s team can help you with everything from big-picture marketing strategy to the nitty-gritty of creating trackable campaigns. If you’d prefer one-on-one guidance or would like to discuss how our assistance can help you better track your marketing efforts, please don’t hesitate to contact the local marketing experts at Skol Marketing.
