Campaign Links on Printed Materials

Three pieces of print, one address

This spring the business paid for three kinds of print: a postcard mailed to past customers, a small ad in the community paper, and new lettering on the vans. All three carry the same web address.

Analytics shows March's visits mostly as direct traffic, which is how it files anyone who types an address, and the rest as searches for the business name.

Which piece of print sent them is recorded nowhere. When the paper calls about renewing the ad, the decision will be a guess.

It does not need to be. Each printed piece can carry an address of its own.

Why print disappears in the reports

When somebody clicks a link, their browser usually tells your site where the click came from, and Analytics files the visit under that source.

A typed address carries no such information. The person who read the postcard and the person who saw the van type the same thing, arrive the same way, and look identical in every report.

Analytics can only report what it is told. Campaign tags are the way of telling it.

The printed pieces most businesses have

• Vehicle lettering and wraps, read for a few seconds in traffic.
• Flyers and door hangers left around a neighbourhood.
• Ads in community papers, programs and directories.
• Postcards and mailers sent to past customers.
• Business cards, quotes and invoices handed over in person.
• Signs on the building, on job sites and at events.

The first is the hardest to measure, because nobody remembers a long address glimpsed from the next lane. Whatever goes on a van has to be short enough to recall at a red light.

A short address for each piece

The method is simple. Each printed piece gets its own short address on your domain: the usual address followed by a single word, such as /postcard or /paper.

That short address does nothing except redirect. The server sends the visitor straight on to the right page, with campaign tags added to the end of the link.

The visitor sees the page they expected. Analytics reads the tags and files the visit under the piece that sent it.

Choose words people can type without thinking: lowercase, one word if possible, and nothing that confuses a zero with the letter o.

What the tags say

Universal Analytics reads three main tags. The source names the piece, such as postcard or van. The medium names the kind of channel, and for anything on paper, print is the natural choice.

The campaign names the push, such as spring-2017. Keep every value lowercase and spelled identically each time, or one postcard will appear in the reports as two separate sources.

Google's free campaign URL builder puts the tagged link together from the values you enter, so nothing is mistyped. Nobody ever has to read or type the result.

Setting up the redirects

Whoever maintains your site can set up a short address in a few minutes, in the hosting control panel, the server's configuration or a redirect plugin.

Ask for a temporary redirect rather than a permanent one. Browsers remember permanent redirects, so if the short address is later pointed somewhere new, returning visitors may keep landing on the old page.

Then test each address before anything goes to the printer. Type it into a phone, check the page that opens, and look at the Real-Time report: the visit should show under the source you chose.

A worked example

An auto glass company with three vans and a small shop mails a postcard to past customers each spring, runs an ad in the community paper, and has its address painted on every van.

The owner suspected the paper ad did little, but had nothing to show either way, and the paper's sales representative pointed to the steady direct traffic as proof that it worked.

Before this year's mailing in February, each piece got its own address: the domain followed by /spring on the postcard, and by /paper in the ad.

The vans got a short second domain the company already owned, redirecting with tags of its own.

Each redirect took visitors to the chip repair page with the season's offer, rather than to the home page.

By the start of April the Campaigns report showed visits from each piece side by side, and the renewal conversation with the paper is now about a figure rather than a feeling.

Send each piece to a matching page

A short address does not have to open the home page. It can open the page that continues what the print started.

A postcard offering spring chip repair should land on the chip repair page, with the same offer in the same words. A visitor who has to hunt for the offer they just read often gives up.

Keep that page live for as long as the print is in circulation, which for a postcard on a fridge can be most of a year.

Reading the results honestly

Not everyone types the short address. Many people read a postcard, remember the name, and search for it instead, and those visits arrive as searches with no tag at all.

So the tagged figures are a floor, not a total. Their value is in comparison: this piece against that one, this spring against last.

Watch the dates as well. Searches for your business name that rise the week a mailing lands are part of that mailing's effect, tag or no tag.

The counter-case

Some print is not meant to send visits. Lettering on a van builds familiarity over years, and judging it by one month of tagged visits will undersell it.

A business with a single printed piece, or one where nearly every response is a phone call, may learn more from a tally by the phone or a separate number than from tags.

And on a small site the numbers may be modest. Modest figures still settle arguments that impressions cannot.

For any print you pay to renew, give each piece its own short address and let the Campaigns report do the counting.

Before the next print run

1. List every printed piece still in circulation.
2. Choose a short address for each one.
3. Build the tagged link it should open.
4. Set up temporary redirects on your domain.
5. Test every address on a phone first.
6. Send each one to a matching page.
7. Compare the pieces after a full month.

Step five is the one that protects the print run. A short address that opens an error page wastes every copy it appears on, and nobody notices until the flyers are already delivered.

Making sure those visits are not then hidden from the reports is covered in analytics filters that hid real visitors.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.