Tracking Print Advertising

Marketing offline for an online business can make it difficult to track just how much traffic or sales that print ad generated. Ordinarily, with online advertising, you can track ad response by using special tracking URLs. But how can you do the same with print advertising?

When placing an advertisement in print media, don't use anything like www.yourdomain.com/papername - most people would never type in that full domain, and you will be lucky if people type in www.yourdomain.com. And especially if you are advertising an affiliate or consultant site, where typing in the root domain would not get you any benefits, you should instead use a separate domain name. After all, it would be horrible to go to the trouble of advertising in print to go to www.companyname.com/yourname/ when the majority of people would be going to www.companyname.com instead.

Instead, go and register a new domain name, and then forward it to your existing domain, that way you can go ahead and track exactly how many visitors that particular print ad generated.

You should host the domain on your own hosting account however. Using a domain service such as GoDaddy's domain name forwarding servicem so you can have full access to the stats easily. Otherwise, you will need to watch your logs to see how many times that domain shows up as a referral for your main site.

Once you have a second domain, you can use it for different print campaigns as well - you might use it in a weekly newspaper one month, or in a monthly magazine the next. There will be some overlap, but it will help keep your expenses down.

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