Do You Know Which Print Ads Are Sending Visitors To Your Website?

Marketing 101 - everyone knows it - track your results. However, in the age of the Internet, marketers are scrambling to find out how to market their site and are at a loss as to what tools they actually have available to them. The ones who are aware of the available tools are generally programmers or IT personnel who seldom give marketing a second thought. They're just happy to have the site up and running properly.

Marketers, on the other hand, assume there's no real way to track off-line promotions that send visitors to the company web site. Wrong. There are actually 3 ways to track this activity and all three require that you have access to site statistics - in particular "referring domain" information.

Referring domains are where your site visitors are coming from to get to your site. If they come from Google, the referring domain is www.google.com. If they typed in your URL directly or bookmarked it, the referring domain is www.yourdomain.com. Okay, so now that you know that you want to look for the "referring domain" in your site statistics, how can you determine which ad or promo is sending you the visitors?

METHOD #1
This is actually the easiest method, but it requires that your site statistic software provide you with the entire URL of the referring domain. So, let's say you place an ad in Thomas Register. When you show your website address in the ad list it like this: "www.yourdomain.com?TR." Now, on your site statistics you will be able to tell how many people actually typed in the full URL to access your site - thus they saw your ad in Thomas Register.

If your site statistic software trunctuates at the "?", you may have to use methods 2 or 3, however, before jumping to that conclusion check to see if your software will allow you set up a "watch." A watch is where you enter a specific URL like, www.yourdomain.com?TR, and the software will automatically count each time that exact URL is entered. You can create a different code after the "?" for each publication or ad that you want to track.

METHOD #2
This is a little more difficult than method 1, but it's still very easy. Simply save the main page of your web site (probably index.html, index.htm or default.htm) with a new name, like tr.htm (we'll stick with our Thomas Register example). Place this page in your main directory and list your site in your print ad like this: www.yourdomain.com/tr.htm. You will need to create an ".htm" file for each publication or ad that you wish to track.

One of the drawbacks of this method is that some people who consider themselves Internet savvy may neglect to type the ".htm" or ".html" file extension. In that case they will get a 404 "file not found" error. To avoid that happening, you can use method #3.

METHOD #3
This is the more complex of the three methods, but it's still pretty easy to do. First, at your website, create a new directory - we'll call it TR, staying with our Thomas Register example. Now, save a copy of your first page in this new directory - but be sure to fix the links. You will need to add "../" in front of each of the links to bring the user out of this sub-directory and back to the main directory of your site so that the links work properly. Now, in your printed ad, your website address will be: www.yourdomain.com/TR. You will need to create a directory for each ad or promotion that you want to track and advertise that domain in that publication's print ad. (Check with your hosting company to insure that sub-directories with automatically defer to index.htm, index.html or default.htm - most will.)

Will the ad viewer type in the complete URL? Most will - they're afraid they will be sent to the incorrect page if they don't. The only one that might cause problems is Method 2, as mentioned. Sometimes people neglect to add the file extension, however, once they get the 404 error, they will probably check the ad again and add the file extension. You may be surprised at how many visitors are coming to your site via off-line advertising!