What makes online marketing so appealing is we can track every action and nearly every interaction on our website.

If you have an SEO program, we can show you how many visits you get for each keyword and how that traffic meets a desired objective on your site. If you run a PPC campaign, we can see the ROI for each individual keyword you target in your campaign – for example, bidding on “richmond widgets” has cost you $20 in clicks and given back $75 in revenue.

But even in 2010, businesses and brands are still putting money into offline marketing channels – be it radio, TV, or print. Fortunately, you don’t have to be left in the dark as to whether or not these campaigns are having a meaningful impact on your business.

The following is a simple, but a very powerful way to measure an offline campaign as it relates back to your website.

The inherent problem with offline campaigns is there isn’t a unique condition associated with the visitor once they land on your site. With online campaigns, Google Analytics has built in tracking to automatically segment visitors based on the condition with which they arrived – i.e. from pay-per-click, search engine, etc. Since there is no inherent condition for someone who saw your advertisement in the Sunday paper and then went to your site, we need to create a condition for them. Here’s a scenario:

You are the owner of Acme Widgets & Doodads, Inc. Your website is http://www.acmeproductsinc.com. Up until now, every advertisement you’ve run offline uses the acmeproducts.com web address. The issue here is when someone sees the advertisement and types acmeproductsinc.com in their browser, they automatically get dropped in the bucket with everyone else who directly visits acmeproducts.com.  Regardless of whether they saw your advertisement, were referred to the site by a friend, saw it on a business card, or already knew the web address some other way, they all look the same in the data.

This time around, you really want to see the effect of a new widget advertisement in this month’s trade magazine and how it impacts site traffic and online sales. So what do you do? You send them somewhere else.

Kind of…

As we already covered, giving everyone your standard web address dumps them into the very large category of Direct Traffic. To break away from this, you can implement a vanity URL in your advertisement. A vanity URL is nothing more than a separate web address that automatically redirects back to your primary site.

So for your widget advertisement, you advertise the URL UseAcmeWidgets.com instead of AcmeProductsinc.com. You have your web guys set it up so when someone visits this address, they automatically get redirected to acmeproductsinc.com.

(Note: This is NOT sending them to a mirror site. They are seeing the same site at the same address – acmeproductsinc.com. They are simply passing through a different URL before arriving at the main site.)

The user experience hasn’t changed, but by passing them through the faux web address, ultimately sending them back to the main site, we can break down everything they do on the site and credit the advertisement for generating the traffic. When we redirect a vanity URL to your main site, we can add special tracking that makes Google Analytics process the data the way we want to see it. By creating this condition, we can then break down the data to only show those who passed through the vanity URL. This let’s you see how much revenue print advertisements contribute to your bottom line and by using the same technique with radio or TV (using a unique address in each case), you can compare conversion rate and see which has been most effective.

If you run an ecommerce site, you can tie it directly back to purchases and order value:

It’s a relatively simple method, but it’s very effective – so long as you have the right tools in the right place. The possibilities don’t end here as there are ways to dive deeper and deeper into time and geography. If for no other reason, this is a testament to the power of implementing an effective website with the proper web analytics in any marketing campaign – online or off.