If you are already familiary with creating your tracking links and want to track offline marketing campaigns in Google Analytics you have 2 choices.
Given that the tracking links are long and ugly and completely unsuitable for advertising you will still create your tracking link as standard and then you can either:
- Use a URL shortning tool
- Use a nice looking url using your own domain
If you use a shortning tool, like bit.ly, is.gd, goo.gl etc then your tracking link parameters will still be passed to GA successfully.
This might be fine if you are just doing a promotion on twitter or another social networking site but if you want to use a tracking link in your printed or more coporate communications you should probably create your own using your branded domain.
To do this you will need to choose a nice looking, unique URL which is also relevant for your campaign, so:
yourdomain.com/offer
yourdomain.com/tv
yourdomain.com/100
yourdomain.com/radio
yourdomain.com/xmas
etc
Then you will 301 redirect your nice url to the tracking link which you generated. This means people get to type in a short and memorable URL and you can still identify which marketing effort they came from.
301 redirects can be done at page or server level so either way you will need to get your IT team or web guys to set it up for you unless you are comfortable tackling this yourself.
There’s always the chance that someone will post your nice url somewhere on the internet which could mean that it pollutes your true figures. But good old GA can filter those out easily by checking which of your campaign visits were from referring URL’s.
The people who typed your promotional link directly into their browsers won’t have a referring site associated with them whereas the visitors who clicked the nice URL they found on a site will.
If you found this helpful please let us know…
