What is the best way of tracking direct traffic coming from print ads?

[Lael]

I have numerous print ads running and I would like to see which ads are sending traffic to my site.  What is the best way of doing this?  Redirects? Is this a recommended practice?  Thanks!

[SteveOllington]

You need to visit kaushik.net. Avinash has got a bunch of really cool ways to measure mutli-channel for offline as well as online.

I would guess it's too complex for a person to be able to explain in an answer on here as it's something that needs comprehensive instructions really. Try this: http://www.webanalytics20.com/ and you'll be sorted I think he has some videos on YouTube that might help too.

[MarieHaynes]

One solution could be to have a different url for each print ad.  For example, you could advertise with:

Visit example.com?ref=a

but, that's ugly.

Another possibility would be to buy some new domain names that you could use in print and then 301 those to your main domain.  So, let's say you have a business that sells plumbing supplies and your website was www.anycityplumber.com.  You could run a print ad and say, "Visit www.ToiletProblemsInAnycity for more information!"  Then, ToiletProblemsInAnycity is a 301 redirect to your site.  You can then use your analytics data to see how much traffic your site gets from each of your made up domains.

[edit]Another way to use a new domain name would be to buy some for particular promotions, so buy something like www.anycityplumberfallcontest.com and then redirect that to your site.[/edit]

And finally, a variation on the first would be to have a separate folder for each landing page.  So, you could advertise, "Visit www.Example.com/AnyCityNews/ for more information".  The info on that landing page would be directly geared towards whatever the print ad was talking about.

[KeriMorgret]

From personal experience, I found people stripped off the stuff I added to a URL. At Maker Faire one year we distributed a couple of thousand postcards with our URL and /make at the end. Hundreds of direct visits over the next couple of days, but all to the home page -- I think fewer than five went to the /make.

[crvw]

I'd consider custom landing pages with vanity URL's (rather than parameters) for each ad.  Say you are the ABC company and you're running Ads in Esquire and GQ magazine.

URL for the GQ ad could be:  www.abc.com/GQ

URL for the Esquire ad could be:  www.abc.com/Esquire

Bonus points, for having unique content on each landing page optimized for that publications readership.  If you absolutely can't do unqiue content, then don't create duplicate content, have 301 redirect both pages to your generic landing page.

If your publishing engine won't let you create vanity URL's, then you could pass the URL's with the ugly parameters through a URL shortner to get a very short URL.  Many readers might appreciate fewer keystrokes to type, but obviously no readers will remember the URL, so you'll only get traffic that actively has the ad in front of the PC.

You might also consider adding QR codes in your print ads to ease readers getting to your pages and traffic attribution.

If it's an ad that people are likey to see what they are out and about... maybe a pub they read at the nail salon, doctors office, beach, etc.. rather than in their office/home you defiantely want to think about making all your landing pages mobile optmized.  Perhaps even use a SMS shortcode as a response to the ad.  That will make it easy on your readers, and give you excellent attribution capabilities.

Goodluck!

[KeriMorgret]

Also make a notation in your analytics program about the day that each of these ads hit the general public. Like I mentioned in my earlier response, my experience was people would just type in the abc.com and ignore the /GQ or /Esquire. Having a notation in your analytics account can help you account for some of the direct traffic that just goes to the home page.