I have a retail site and we have just spent so cash on offline ads in national magazines. Can anybody suggest the best way to track the resultant visits to our site?
Well it's a hard thing to do. But, if the site is starting from scratch and you have almost no visitors, than verything would be from the offline advertising and you would see a spike in your stats, or not. If you are selling something you can ask the customer how they heard about your website/service. Or you can setup a survey at your website. I hope this gives you an idea. Sandra
The idea is to have a specific URL set-up for your offline advert; that will obviously give you sound stats. Colm
If your print ads are already in place and you did not provide a special offer and a link to a special offer landing page, it is going to be very difficult to measure the web traffic generated by the ad (hint: do this in future print ads.) However, you could ask visitors to your home page to tell you where they heard of you (could be a link to a page with a form with a list of the advertising sources you are using.) It will not be completely accurate, but perhaps better than nothing. You can at least gauge which of the ads is more effective by the relative number of responses that you get.
As others have said, you want to create a website that redirects to your sales page, for every piece of offline advertising you do. You also want to make it as short and as memorable as possible.
Simply by process of elimination, if you have traffic tracker, then most likely those that dont link to your site from your online advertisement came from the offline ads.