What is the best method in tracking offline advertising?

[Tim Schneider]

I think this will work better as a discussion.

 

Comment by Courtney Smolen 5 minutes ago

What is the best method in tracking offline advertising (print materials, radio, TV spots, etc.) with GA? I'm not sure if giving a vanity URL to everything campaign in every medium is the right approach, and since GA can be a bit "unforgiving" in removing goals and campaigns if done inaccurately, I wouldn't want to begin on the wrong foot in this. Any direction/advice or article pieces that speak about this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Tim Schneider]

I always find this tough - especially when you're planning and trying to get folks to use the vanity URLs and/or campaign tagging.

Vanity URLs work great for print. But for radio, TV, media relations type stuff, I think you start to look at the time frames when the ads are out, and look to GA for:

• Direct traffic
• Search traffic

We recently had a large event that had several high profile speakers, ran over the course of 5 days and received good media coverage.

 

As a result, the "branded search" traffic steadily increased towards the event. This traffic was also the highest conversion rate source.

We did posters, print and online ads as well. However, the search traffic was our most valuable.

[Vern Hume]

Hi Tim,

If you do not want to set up campaign specific URLs and include them on your offline advertising, then you will have to do this a bit indirectly.   What you will be looking for are lifts in your metrics for new visitors and branded search traffic.  Plot out when the offline campaigns run and look for lift during or after heavy periods of offline campaign activity in direct traffic segmented by new visits and branded search segmented by new visits.  You will need to have a baseline to compare this to.   In theory if the advertising is working it should drive new traffic.

 

Hope that helps,

 

Cheers,

 

V

[Tim Schneider]

Thanks, Vern. I overlooked the New Visitors segment. Good addition.