The main reason why businesses decide to transition gradually from the traditional media toward digital marketing is that it’s difficult to accurately track the ROI (return on investment) of the campaigns. But, that doesn’t necessarily prove that traditional media and advertising is completely redundant. Businesses in certain niches are seen to benefit more from traditional advertising primarily owing to the unchanged media consumption behavior of the customers in those niches. In such cases Google Analytics can help in accurately measuring the ROI of the offline media campaigns.

Let me elaborate on how you can use Google Analytics to measure the ROI of offline media:

As Google is growing in demand amongst the online advertisers, the search giant is trying its best to further outpower its competitors like Yahoo! Bing ads by expanding its scope of business across traditional media as well. Here’s how you can effectively drive your offline customers and prospects to a place where Google Analytics can efficiently track their actions and behavior:

Use of the URL Builder

When you run a traditional media advertising campaign such as a TV commercial, a Radio spot or a newspaper classified, you can encourage people to visit your website. This way you will receive a direct traffic to your website. Such traffic is also referred to as type-in traffic. Such traffic will not be accounted for by your existing website link profiles such as search engine results, social media, paid PPC ads or a blog post linking to your site, etc.

In Google Analytics, the direct traffic is shown as a visit to your home page. So, if those direct visits to your home page come from the traditional media ads, then it will be difficult to differentiate those visits. This is where URL Builder can come handy.

It’s a tool provided by Google Analytics. Using the URL Builder, you can generate labels for each of your traffic source. This way, you can easily identify which type of traditional media campaign drove the visits to your site. All you need to do is fill out the URL Builder form and click on “Generate URL”.This will create a dedicated URL for your specific traditional media campaign.

It is also possible to run A/B split ads for such URLs that you have generated using the URL Builder tool. The A/B split testing is possible not just within different types of traditional media marketing campaigns, but also within one type of media.

But, since these URLs are generated automatically, they are not necessarily user-friendly. Such URLs are typically longer and complex. As a result you would need to follow the second step as mentioned below.

Beautification of your URLs

You might already be aware that there are several ways in which you can beautify the URLs generated automatically by the URL Builder tool.

# 1 – You have the option of purchasing the vanity URLs. This is the domain name that you would specifically purchase for directing the traffic to another domain. The vanity URL is short and easy to remember. And then using domain name forwarding services, you can easily redirect the traffic to your actual URLs on the website.

# 2 – The other option is to set up sub folders in your main domain folder according to the traditional media campaigns. And once you have created this sub folder, you can set up the PHP redirect file to automatically divert traffic to the tracking URL.

# 3 – You can shorten the URL created by the URL Builder tool. There are many URL shortner tools available online such as Goo.gl or Bit.ly. But, again these automatically generated short URL are not user friendly.

# 4 – And lastly, you can create separate domains and tracking URLs for different types of offline media campaigns.

Need more specific details for merging your traditional media campaigns with Google Analytics? Give a shout out in the comments below and I will set you up for a meeting with one of our Google Analytics experts.

Until the next post, have a good one…