Tracking Set Up PHASE 2

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The second phase to tracking your direct mail is the creation of a vanity domain. Out of this entire tracking concept, this is the part people seem to get hung up on the most. Hopefully, you will see a clearer image in your mind after this quick run down. This is the URL you will promote in all your offline promotional efforts. Your print Design will contain the vanity URL.

How a Vanity Domain and Google Analytics Work Together

Visitors arriving from the vanity domain will be isolated and look like this is reports.

This is a live example of a site we just set up. If you enter the domain name you see above into your browser you will see what happens. Pay attention to the URL.

Decide on Domain Name

Create a nice, short, easy to remember, and simple domain name that will become your domain name shown on all printing.

Here is an Example of a Good Vanity Domain

Dseauto.com is the domain name used for clients and printing. The destination domain name is dseautomotive.com. Now email addresses and URL characters are much less—easier for people accessing the site by URL entry. If you click through to desauto.com, you are redirected to dseautomotive.com with the referral data in the URL.

To Test click dseauto.com

When the data arrives in Google Analytics we see;

Register Domain

Register your domain name of choice.

Install Google Analytics Custom Tracking

Modified tracking code is required for this step. There are 3 options shown of the Conversion University site, but we have tested other ways that work more effective for print tracking.

PHASE 3- Make Sure it Works

  • Test Tracking

Diagnostic tools can be used in addition to the simple test of looking in your Google Analytics Traffic Sources

Confirm Referral Source

The traffic source should be labeled as “print” if that is what you defined in your tagging method used in the vanity domain script.

The last two phases of configuring tracking to measure your print, TV or radio are easy to verify. Now that we have our source defined we can see where they go on your website. How many visits from this marketing channel convert to action? If your Google Analytics set up has been professionally configured then we should be measuring the success of the goals…product purchases, store visits, leads, and brand lift effect, etc.

That some cool stuff that truly transforms the words “junk mail” into a valuable marketing vehicle that can be measured and analyzed.

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