Tracking Offline Advertising with Google Analytics
August 11th, 2010 | 
Author: When we talk about tracking campaigns, it is not enough to focus only on online campaigns. We have to include the offline campaigns in our reports for complete analysis. You will need to use the Google Analytics URL Builder. In this section, I will share with you one method of tracking your offline campaigns in Google Analytics in 2 simple steps:
- In your offline ads, refer visitors to a page that is unique to the campaign; [www.store.com/computers]
- Tag all visitors to the unique page with the campaign variables [source, medium, & campaign name] set in the GA URL Builder.
How to tag all visitors to www.store.com/computers with the campaign variables?
We will assume that all visitors to the unique landing page [www.store.com/computers] are coming from a specific offline campaign lets say the ComputerUSA magazine.
How do we tag destination URLs?
- Go to the URL Builder
- Enter the following variables into the URL builder:
Website URL: http://www.store.com/computers Campaign Source: ComputerUSA Campaign Medium: Magazine Campaign Name: Holiday Promo - Add the following code to the header of landing page before the Google Analytics tracking code
<head> <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.store.com/mother” /> <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1;URL=http://www.store.com/?utm_source=usa-today&utm_medium=newspaper&utm_campaign=Mother’s%2BDay%202010″> </head>
Replace the url in the code above with your new url from the URL Builder.
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