One of the reasons digital marketing has been so successful is the extraordinary ability to track results from these online channels. Marketer’s can make a direct connection to their online efforts to the conversions and revenue that they drive, which is exactly how agencies justify their value. However, there is a still a rather large gap between the measurement of online and offline marketing results. The issue resides in the fact that many of the results generated by online marketing occur offline and vice versa. Finding a way to bridge this gap is crucial for agencies to prove their true value.
Unique Landing Pages
An excellent way to segment out website visitors generated from offline channels is through unique landing pages. If you can drive these visitors to URLs specific to a channel or advertisement, you can effectively track offline generated leads using online results. These landing pages should be highly relevant to the ad that drove the web visit in order to keep conversion rates high. Another useful tip is to keep these URLs short. In addition to keeping URLs short, you can also consider custom short URLs since generic links can still be quite difficult to remember. Custom short URLs, on the other hand, can be designed to be both short and memorable. You can seamlessly sync your online and offline marketing efforts and make it as easy as possible for people to find you by using a link like YourBrand.is/Online, rather than a short string of numbers and letters.
Redirect Domains
Another method for tracking offline marketing channels is through the use of unique URLs at the domain level. By sending web visitors to a unique branding domain and then redirecting them to your main website, you have the ability to segment these offline generated web leads. This method allows you to use unique domains that tend to be more memorable when seen offline. However, you may be much more limited in the amount of unique domains you can acquire as opposed to the amount of unique landing pages you can generate.
Discount Codes
Using unique promotional codes is another excellent way to segment your channels and tie them directly to revenue. This method bridges our online/offline gap in both directions – allowing for a complete view of the results both online and off. Generating unique codes for each of your marketing channels allows you to measure the amount of business each channel is driving to your clients. The one downside here is that discount codes tend to get shared around the internet on websites like RetailMeNot, etc.
Call Conversions
Call tracking software enables agencies to track offline results from online and offline marketing channels. Calls convert to revenue 10 times more often than web leads, so tracking these results should be at the top of your agency’s priorities. These phone leads are often the most valuable, but they don’t typically receive the same attention as web leads. Agencies without call tracking aren’t able to track offline call conversions the same way they can track online conversions, and this is a problem. In fact, our research found that without call attribution, 49% of conversions may be missed or misattributed to the wrong source. Correcting this issue allows you to prove to your clients the full impact of your services.
The ability to track both online and offline sources is crucial for agencies. If you can’t fully prove the positive impact you are providing your clients, you may find yourselves dead in the water. Utilizing these techniques will help you to prove online and offline results from all of your marketing channels. To learn more about how call attribution can benefit agencies, check out our white paper, Agency Marketing in a Mobile World: Prove and Improve ROI with Call Attribution and Automation.
