Track Your OFFLINE Marketing With Google Analytics

/ Google Analytics, Internet Marketing, Tutorials / By

IMG_1128Jared At NADA

At the NADA convention in Las Vegas in February there were a few speakers that I wanted to sit in on, and Jared was one of them. With a crazy schedule and various conflicts the only time I was able to go to his session was a translated version. So needless to say it was entertaining to see Jared try and slow himself down so as to not have the translators throwing things at him from the back of the room.

In addition to seeing Jared struggle to keep his passion and message at a translatable pace I received some additional entertainment from the international crowd. About 15 to 20 minutes into his talk, Jared uses a football analogy that he modified to soccer to help connect better with this World audience. It had to do with how different peer groups would determine who the best soccer player in the world was/is. Both of the examples were Brazilian players, Ronaldo and Pele. I just happened to be sitting behind a group from Argentina that for the rest of the talk couldn’t get over the fact that Jared had used two Brazilian players instead of Lionel Messi, and quite frankly I don’t think they heard another word he said for the next 45 minutes. Although I probably get more humor out of that than most of you having been married for 20 years to a Brazilian woman, had you seen the look on the face of the youngest of the group I guanentee that you would have been laughing with me.

Back to the point of my post – Tracking OFFLINE marketing

So in watching Jared speak on how to set up your Google Analytics to track your online marketing, it reminded me of a talk/post that I did about 3 years ago. It was a tutorial on using Google Analytics to track your offline marketing. All of the same principles apply, but they are even more relevant now that Google has become a more powerful tool. By setting up custom channels for your Google Analytics reports you can use this process to determine the efficiency of your offline marketing and keep the vendors involved accountable.

The steps are very simple;

  1. Market a vanity URL in your radio, TV, Direct Marketing, billboard or other type of offline marketing. By vanity URL I mean an easy to remember URL that you own but don’t use for a website e.g. www.SaveBigNow.com
  2. Create a destination page on your site or micro-site. This page can be either your home page or preferably a landing page made specifically to convert your message.
  3. Create a Google Analytics tracking URL using Googles URL builder tool.
  4. Shorten the link and create a QR code if you want (this step is optional)
  5. Forward the link to your destination page.

That’s it. Here is a video on how to accomplish the steps.