Figure 14-4: The Social Engagement Report in the New Google Analytics.
Keeping an Eye on Offline Marketing
Offline marketing can be as elusive to track as a phone call. How do you know if your billboard, poster, flyer, or mailer is bringing traffic to your site? It can be frustrating not knowing how the hard-earned money you spend on advertising is working to generate leads. (Actual sales have their own ROI — income — which is much easier to follow).
Using QR Codes
One popular method right now is the use of QR Codes. Keep in mind that QR Codes work only if the customer
Has a smartphone handy and is willing to click
Knows what a QR Code is and how to scan it
Fortunately, QR Codes have become fairly ubiquitous, so there is a good chance the customer knows how to use them.
Google has embraced the QR Code technology over Microsoft’s version of the clickable code and other methods, unsurprisingly. This works in your favor because Google now generates a trackable QR Code for you that you can then layer on a trackable short URL and get double traction on metrics. When building your QR Code through Google’s QR Code builder (see Figure 14-5), you add your analytics segments right into it during the build.
One more layer is needed in addition to something clickable like a QR Code on your offline marketing, and that is tracking code for each campaign. This tracking code helps you set goals for these codes inside analytics to give more depth to the metrics you get from successful click traction. A tracking code can be anything, but is usually a short series of letters or abbreviations similar to a hashtag (Hint: Some people use their hashtags to generate these tracking codes as well for cross-marketing purposes).
Figure 14-5: Google’s QR Code builder.
Another key component for offline campaign tracking is to make the referral URL you send folks unique to that campaign. By giving the campaign a landing page (preferably one with an URL built using the Google Analytics URL Builder) and tagging visitors with variables unique to the campaign, you make your metrics more useful. For example:
<head> <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.URL.com/valentine” /> <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1;URL=http://www.URL.com/?utm_source=NYTimes&utm_medium=newspaper&utm_campaign=VALENTINE2012″> </head>
Tracking television ads
A subset of offline marketing, and a large market, is television. Much like call tracking, Google has introduced a way to track AdWords TV ad campaigns in Analytics if your AdWords account is linked in to Analytics.
If you’re wondering how on earth you get AdWords television ads in the first place, simply visit this link to get started with AdWords TV ads in national markets:
To get to the TV analytics for your TV ads, follow these steps:
1. Sign in to your AdWords account and go to the Reporting tab.
You should see your Analytics page.
2. Click TV Campaigns under AdWords inside the Traffic Sources section.
This section automatically appears if your Analytics and AdWords accounts are linked. If you don’t see it, you need to link your accounts.
3. Sign in to your Analytics account and choose the URL/domain where the TV ads landing page is located.
4. Click Traffic Sources, click AdWords, and then click TV Campaigns.
From here, you can look at your metrics.
5. Fine-tune the URLs and landing pages you’re using in your television ads.
6. Set up any advanced segmentation and goals necessary to track metrics of TV ads.
In this Reporting area, you can set up specific reports to track performance metrics (how many times TV ads played, for example), visit quality (time on site from each TV ad, for example), Conversions (Goal Conversion Rates from each ad), and ecommerce (track revenue transactions on TV ad landing pages and more).
Keep in mind that call tracking and TV tracking both have a cost in AdWords! They usually fall under the PPC (pay per click) ad budget, so you need to consider cost when you set up these campaigns.
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