Here are five simple, yet effective methods for tying the knot between offline and online advertising.

Vanity URLs
Buy a new domain name (not a new website), just the domain name. So for example, your current site is www.acmehomesva.com and you want to do a big marketing push promoting the great experience customers have in the new homes you build. In this case, you might buy acmeexperience.com. Then in your next offline marketing campaign, you only promote the acmeexperience.com web address.

“But wait, Chris! You said we’re not building a new website!” That’s still correct. All we do is take the new web address and redirect it – or forward – the visitor to your existing website. By making a few modifications here and there, we can track everyone who came to the original website but originally typed acmeexperience.com into their browser. From here we can analyze the traffic in Google Analytics and separate the acmeexperience.com visitors to better understand volume and onsite behavior.

Coded URLs
The concept of coded URLs is similar to the vanity URLs, but work slightly better in a promotional application (at least, in my opinion). Here’s how it works.

Your site is acme.com. This month you’re running a promotion where a customer can win a cruise vacation. Instead of buying a new web address like in the previous example, simply promote acme.com/cruise in all offline campaigns. When someone types this address, it redirects them to acme.com/promo/sweeps/pdsgf97032473-1a.com (or something else that’s unreadable) where they can begin to register. Since they entered from acme.com/cruise and we know this address was only promoted offline, we can attribute all visitors to the offline campaign.

Adwords/PPC
Ahh, Adwords. You never fail to disappoint. Buying some Google Adwords advertising for your brand name or promotion name is a great and instantaneous way to capture curious searchers. Here’s a scenario:

You’re running a promotional campaign using a character (think of the Old Spice Guy). While the idea is to get people to the Old Spice site or to buy Old Spice Deodorant, I would also recommend they buy Google Advertising for “Old Spice Guy.” This way, when someone says, “YOU HAVE TO GO GOOGLE ‘OLD SPICE GUY.’ HE’S HILARIOUS,” your ad shows up directing people to the Old Spice Guy section of your site. Not only does it give you a sense for how well the campaign worked, but it gives you insight into how well people took to the character.

Promo Codes
This is another effective strategy that has a couple great benefits. The scenario is you run a promotion for 10% off a purchase but require customers enter a promo code on purchase to get their discount. When doing this I recommend modifying the code based on the specific channel you ran the promotion. For example, if you advertise on Q94, make the promotion code “q94.” If you advertise on the Jackie show at 4pm, make the promo code “jackie.” Not only does the promotion entice visitors to take action, but they are essentially telling you exactly how they heard about it.

Measuring Direct/Branded Traffic Impact
If you plan on doing any offline advertising and also have a website, this method should be used – no matter if you use some or all of the methods above.

Whenever we try to get people to do something “special” (e.g. visit a specific web address, use a promotional code, etc) it’s inevitable that some people won’t get it right and will rely on just coming to your website and hoping to see what they’re looking for. Beyond that, it’s always likely that in doing a promotional campaign you’re also building your brand and top of mind awareness to the market place. The way to measure these effects is to monitor two specific traffic sources during the time you run these campaigns.

First, measure any fluctuations in direct traffic (i.e. traffic that came directly to your website by typing in your web address or clicking a bookmark). If you notice any spike in this channel during the time period you ran your offline campaigns, all else being equal, you can comfortably attribute most of the impact to the offline campaign.

The other channel to closely monitor is branded search traffic. Branded search traffic is simply traffic that came from a search engine but INCLUDED your brand name in the search. These are people who know your brand but don’t know your website. Also, there are people who choose to type “yoursite.com” into Google instead of the address bar (admit it, you’ve been guilty of this at some point).

Monitor any fluctuations in this traffic source along with direct traffic to understand how the offline campaign is influencing online behavior. If you see direct and branded traffic spike 33% during the 5 days you ran your radio campaign and then drop off almost instantly, you probably have the radio campaign to thank for that boost in traffic. Segment those channels and look for how well they did in completing your website goals. If online conversion rate doubled during this 5 day period, radio may be a good place to explore with more budget.

So how about you? Are you advertising offline? What efforts are being made the measure the impact online? There are so many wonderful and “easy-to- implement” methods to get a real sense for how your offline dollars impact your online presence. Are you taking advantage of them? If so, how?

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.