It has been a while since the web has evolved as a strategic business channel. Websites are viewed by the organizations as the key revenue driver and the most efficient way of attracting and retaining customers. Studies have shown that online retailing will grow over the years and a large percentage of the online retailers will be profitable regardless of the retail category. Thus, the emergence of the web as an integrated business channel has increased the significance of Web Analytics. Through the tool of Web Analytics, we can increase the online e business revenue. It is useful for all types of websites, especially E-commerce sites. The goal of the e-commerce sites is to buy some good or services online.
Companies that have online business and offline business can use web analytics as a tool to integrate both types of business. Web Analytics applications can also help companies to measure the results of their traditional print advertising campaigns. It does not make sense to spend money on offline advertising without knowing the percentage of return we get as a result of our advertisement campaigns. For all those who were worried about how to track your offline business campaigns, here is the right solution. Web Analytics will help you out of this situation. We can measure and analyze the effect of our advertisement through Web Analytics. Here are certain ways to increase your revenue by integrating both online and offline business.
The key to integrate online and offline business is tracking your offline campaigns through link tagging. You can measure the offline advertising success exactly the same way as you measure online advertising success through this method. For this, you have to tag the links in your offline ads with the campaign variables used by your web analytics tool. For link tagging you need not put some archaic URL in your offline advertisements. You have to put some simple easy to remember URL in your offline advertisement. The best practice is to create a custom URL or a custom landing page. It will work better than attaching the campaign variables to the URL that you place in your offline advertisements.
When a customer looks for the advertised custom URL or custom landing page, then you should do a page redirect. It will help in tracking the variables. This process helps you to tag your offline campaigns like your online campaigns. In the same web analytics report now, you will be able to view the traffic and conversion for both of your online and offline campaigns. An important thing to note here is that if you publicize your custom URL in other places, then you will end up in driving the traffic that was not generated from your offline campaign. This will naturally reduce the results you want to get.
Example
You can use a friendly URL that is easy to remember http://www.xyz.com/promo, and use a redirect to output a URL with query parameters that are consumable by your analytics tool. Here is an article containing some examples to track campaign through Google analytics.
Web analytics reports help you to know whether your campaign has worked out or not. It will help you to analyze the major pitfalls and will give you a clear idea of how to improve your business, both offline and online. The greatest advantage here is that the steps taken by you will be entirely based on practical data and not mere guesswork.
Custom URLs are also known as vanity URLs or friendly URLs. They are catchy versions of the old, long, boring URL, which makes it easy for the customers to remember. It is the user-friendly version. You can make use of the help of Google URL builder to set up such URLs. It is useful when you have specific offers for your visitors. Unique URLs will lead to the specific landing page that has the offer.
The next best practice for integrating your offline and online business is to use redirects. It is a way to point URL A to URL B. The best method of redirect is using a "301 redirect". All that the redirect tends to say is that the page you are looking for at the URL A is at the URL B. 301 redirects are heavily used in SEO to make sure that when you rename your URL doesn't affect your page ranking in search engines.
From the market level view of your Web Analytics reporting you can infer whether your particular ad is affecting a particular market. It means that your products are better selling in those markets if they have a high correlation of website metrics .You can improve your business in other less performing markets by changing your marketing strategy according to your web analytics report.
It is also a best practice to run an ad words campaign alongside with your offline campaigns in order to capture the customers who search online in reference to your offline ad. Include keywords in your ad words campaign like the themes or phrases used in your offline ad. This will definitely increase ways to integrate and promote your site through offline channels.
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