How to measure the success of your offline marketing? How do you know your ROI of your print, TV or radio ads? In fact, it’s really easy to set up on Google Analytics :-). That type of advertising is expensive, therefore it’s important to know the impact of it.

The company I’m working for is based in London and is launching a new web-based B2C service. We are seriously considering advertising in the london Tube and/or london Cabs. It’s a big step for the company as this would be the first time we use such channels for advertising. I’m quite excited in using those, as it will be something new to measure in my role.

If you’re running PPC, SEO, display advertising, TV ads, radio, advertising on tube, on cabs… it’s key factor for success to track separately every channel, in order to segment data easily and effectively. If you do not do so, you will lose insights in your visitors behavior, and every offline channel will be included or considered as “direct” traffic, not knowing how they heard about your service. Therefore you won’t be able to differentiate the traffic from TV, Radio, print or on street advertising.

Here are a few examples to explain in details:

In the online world, this is quite easy to track the source of a traffic as we usually implement loads of tracking codes on our urls:

http://www.myservice.com/?utm_source=business.com&utm_medium=banner&utm_campain=….

The “utm” parameters are Google Analytics tagging code, which give you the opportunity to report the info you want into your Google Analytics Source Report. For the offline advertising, you can potentially do the same thing, but I have big doubt that someone seeing a print or tube advertising would ever write down or even type that sort of Url:

http://www.myservice.com/?utm_source=offline&utm_medium=tube&utm_campain=….

This would be a great way to actually keep your potential customers away from your business! Instead, we prefer using a vanity url which looks like this:

http://www.myservice.com/discount

As you can imagine, people will remember more easily this type of url. When a prospect type this in their browser, it will automatically redirect to another url with all the tracking parameters you request, giving you the possibility to track your offline visitors. This is a great way to track your offline activity.