What is the best way of tracking direct traffic coming from print ads?
-
I have numerous print ads running and I would like to see which ads are sending traffic to my site. What is the best way of doing this? Redirects? Is this a recommended practice? Thanks!
-
Also make a notation in your analytics program about the day that each of these ads hit the general public. Like I mentioned in my earlier response, my experience was people would just type in the abc.com and ignore the /GQ or /Esquire. Having a notation in your analytics account can help you account for some of the direct traffic that just goes to the home page.
-
I'd consider custom landing pages with vanity URL's (rather than parameters) for each ad. Say you are the ABC company and you're running Ads in Esquire and GQ magazine.
URL for the GQ ad could be: www.abc.com/GQ
URL for the Esquire ad could be: www.abc.com/Esquire
Bonus points, for having unique content on each landing page optimized for that publications readership. If you absolutely can't do unqiue content, then don't create duplicate content, have 301 redirect both pages to your generic landing page.
If your publishing engine won't let you create vanity URL's, then you could pass the URL's with the ugly parameters through a URL shortner to get a very short URL. Many readers might appreciate fewer keystrokes to type, but obviously no readers will remember the URL, so you'll only get traffic that actively has the ad in front of the PC.
You might also consider adding QR codes in your print ads to ease readers getting to your pages and traffic attribution.
If it's an ad that people are likey to see what they are out and about... maybe a pub they read at the nail salon, doctors office, beach, etc.. rather than in their office/home you defiantely want to think about making all your landing pages mobile optmized. Perhaps even use a SMS shortcode as a response to the ad. That will make it easy on your readers, and give you excellent attribution capabilities.
Goodluck!
-
From personal experience, I found people stripped off the stuff I added to a URL. At Maker Faire one year we distributed a couple of thousand postcards with our URL and /make at the end. Hundreds of direct visits over the next couple of days, but all to the home page -- I think fewer than five went to the /make.
-
One solution could be to have a different url for each print ad. For example, you could advertise with:
Visit example.com?ref=a
but, that's ugly.
Another possibility would be to buy some new domain names that you could use in print and then 301 those to your main domain. So, let's say you have a business that sells plumbing supplies and your website was www.anycityplumber.com. You could run a print ad and say, "Visit www.ToiletProblemsInAnycity for more information!" Then, ToiletProblemsInAnycity is a 301 redirect to your site. You can then use your analytics data to see how much traffic your site gets from each of your made up domains.
[edit]Another way to use a new domain name would be to buy some for particular promotions, so buy something like www.anycityplumberfallcontest.com and then redirect that to your site.[/edit]
And finally, a variation on the first would be to have a separate folder for each landing page. So, you could advertise, "Visit www.Example.com/AnyCityNews/ for more information". The info on that landing page would be directly geared towards whatever the print ad was talking about.
-
You need to visit kaushik.net. Avinash has got a bunch of really cool ways to measure mutli-channel for offline as well as online.
I would guess it's too complex for a person to be able to explain in an answer on here as it's something that needs comprehensive instructions really. Try this: http://www.webanalytics20.com/ and you'll be sorted I think he has some videos on YouTube that might help too.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to track search queries with GA
Hi there, I am trying to track my search queries on my site with GA. http://i.imgur.com/Pfkasco.png Until now, I have to result? Any tips?
Search Behavior | | TonikSEO1 -
Search Analytics update in Google Webmasters Tools? Where can we find search queries bringing traffic to website?
I just got up and see Search Analytic's being updated today totally. Their is no option to see old reports. As Search Analytics only share 999 keywords.
Search Behavior | | csfarnsworth
Whats next now?
How can a webmaster finds all search queries bringing traffic to his website?
Any paid or free tool?
Google Analytic's > Acquisition > Search engine optimization > search queries will this area helps? Whole question revolves around. Any good tool that will help you find all the queries bringing traffic to my website?0 -
Direct 100+ URLs to our sister site?
Hi, We have two websites www.eurekasolutions.co.uk and www.eurekaaddons.co.uk - currently the eurekasolutions site has eureka addon products on it - we are thinking of re-directing these to www.eurekaaddons.co.uk instead (there are 100+ pages which are being ranked and picked up by google) Would it be foolish to re-direct these from eurekasolutions straight to eurekaaddons after them being on eurekasolutions for many many years? if so what is the best way to go about it and would this have a direct negative effect on our SEO? Both sites are serving for similar terms. Thanks,
Search Behavior | | EurekaSolutions0 -
Has anyone found a best practice for ranking a client who has one central office location, but a large, regional service area that they want to rank for?
All the most recent local search ranking is based upon physical addresses, but what happens when someone provides services and has staff 100 miles from that central office location, but no physical address to work with?
Search Behavior | | BehrDesign0 -
Is putting/removing Adsense ads on the site affects crawling for seo?
Because I noticed when we totally remove Adsense ads on our site, the pages crawled per day on the google webmastertools suddenly dropped into noticable amount and we tested again to turn it on for a singe day, it jumped up again. So if Adsense affects crawling then, if we have adsense ad on all pages of the site the more chances it gets crawled by the bot? WS76R8w
Search Behavior | | CruiseControl0 -
More USA traffic than UK.
Hi there, I have a site www.nut-job.com and I am currently getting more traffic from the USA than uk. Is there anyway of not getting listed in the USA and telling google that the site is a UK site?
Search Behavior | | nutjobshell0 -
Best way to remove worthless/thin content?
I have a Wordpress site with about 3,000 pages and 1,000 of those are no value/duplicate content and drive no traffic. They are blog posts each with a single image and permalinks like example.com/post1, example.com/post2 etc. I've started by deleting pages and 301 redirecting to relevant pages that actually have content. Is deleting and 301 redirecting the best route? Is 1,000 to many 301 redirects? Should I just delete the pages that aren't really relevant to anything else? Anything else I should know about deleting all of these pages? Any help would be great!
Search Behavior | | gfreeman230 -
Would you say it is more bennificial to seperate keywords in the title tag tag of a page using a common ( keyword , keyword | Domain.com) or using a hyphen as SEOmoz best practices reccommends (keyword - keyword | domain.com)?
Title tag best practices according to seomoz is the following keyowrd - keyword | brand.com but I have seen some interesting results from using a comma as to a hyphen to seperate keywords as reccomended and wanted to know which method is more crawler friendly.
Search Behavior | | JHSpecialty0