How to track the conversion rate of an offline marketing effort

For savvy marketers, tracking and measuring marketing campaign performance is not just important, it’s absolutely fundamental. The insight gleaned is invaluable in guiding current and future marketing decisions and should ultimately govern the allocation of your marketing expenditure. Here are some methods you can use to measure the effectiveness of offline advertising:

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Discount coupons

If you are selling products or services online, you can use promotional codes to track offline users. You can offer exclusive promotions on flyers or coupons that can be tracked as custom variables in Google Analytics.

Custom landing pages

One of the easiest and yet common way to track your offline promotions online is by using custom landing pages specifically created for your offline marketing campaigns. By creating custom landing pages, you can focus on the intent of your campaign and target it toward the audience type that would be attending your offline event and would day later go online to avail the offer or special discount. Creating a custom landing page is a similar process to creating a custom domain, but you use specifically created destinations on your website. For example, www.buyxyz.com/2for1offer.

Shortened URL

Don’t have the time or budget to create custom landing pages? Shortened URLs can help drive users to existing landing pages while racking offline efforts. Before shortening your URLs, use Google’s URL builder to add UTM (tags for your link) parameters to your URLs. This will make them visible in Google Analytics. Sometimes generic shortened links, like those of Google URL Shortener and Bitly, can appear as spams.

Tracking phone calls

It is relatively simple and cost effective to set up new phone numbers to use in advertising, and the data the tracking will produce is invaluable. For each offline advertising campaign, you should use a unique phone number that will help you determine the number of phone calls each piece of advertising generates. For example, you might have posted a print ad for five lucky winners to shop and win phones for which they will be required to give a missed call on a toll free number. Using phone tracking, the data can be directly combined with that of your Google Analytics, combined with a custom landing page is a winning campaign. Using the data generated from tracking you advertising will allow you to make better decisions on where to allocate your marketing budget and increase your overall ROI.

Vanity URL

Vanity URLs are a lot like customer URLs but are great to attract the attention of your audience. You can directly add these on billboards, brochures and other offline marketing material. This will enable you to track the number of people specifically landing on your website. It may be worthwhile investing in a branded short domain (such as mcd.com short for McDonalds) in order to add authenticity to your links.

Emails and content downloads

After a trade show or a pop up, you may want to place leads on a post-event. Take an example of an event where you announce the launch of your new app, you can provide QR codes and get downloads there. Also, if you attach the same to your brochures with vanity URL you can expect a better and higher traction. Track the impact these emails have on your prospects by monitoring email opens, click-through and content downloads.

By measuring the performance of each campaign, marketers are continuously learning and thereby improving which allows them to fine tune campaigns and understand how their target audience interacts with the various touch points and messages they broadcast. What other ways can you track your offline marketing campaigns? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!