I recently spoke to a marketing specializing in offline marketing strategies where sales are closed by phone or online. They're trying to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of offline advertising translating to online sales. This isn't as easy to track as traffic moving from a search engine or other link to a site where web analytics programs can easily measure the conversions.
So, how could they track the effectiveness of their offline ad buys?
One tactic we discussed was using vanity domains that redirect traffic to the primary domain with a tracking URL. What does that mean? Say your main domain is:
www.source4buyingcoolstuff.com If you drive traffic directly to that site through offline advertising, how will you track the conversions caused by the offline ads? Sure, you could track spikes in sales when ads run, but sending visitors to a specific landing page will allow you to measure exactly how many visitors and sales the offline ads generated.
A sub-domain or directory could be used in ads like this:
buynow.source4buyingcoolstuff.com
or
www.source4buyingcoolstuff.com/buynow Buy you'll likely lose a good chunk of potential customers who don't type in those addresses correctly, or can't remember something so long.
Instead, consider setting up a unique domain that's easy to remember, like
www.buycoolstuff1234.com for use in offline advertising.
The primary site could be mirrored at the new domain, but that's not an ideal solution because people will start bookmarking, emailing, and linking to the new URL, splitting the site's PageRank among multiple URLs. A better solution is to redirect users from the new domain to the main site with a tracking URL, like this:
www.buycoolstuff1234.com redirecting traffic to:
www.source4buyingcoolstuff.com/?source=buycoolstuff1234 The exact format of the tracking code will vary by stats program. The point is that you can now track how many visitors arrived at your main site through the other domain.
This is just one of many tactics that can be done to track online sales or leads generated from offline advertising. What strategies have you used and found valuable?
