This may sound like a silly question, because who doesn’t these days, but if you do advertise your web address on multiple channels, like radio, print, television, emails, do you know which channels are returning you the most visits? For example if you receive 2000 visits a month, how do you work out which media spend worked out best for you?
Its easy and businesses in the US have really embraced this simple concept. It involves duplicating your home page on to a number of separate pages that are only used to capture visitors from a specific channel.
So, if your website is www.samplebusiness.com and you advertise on the radio, you might instead advertise your web address to be www.samplebusiness.com/rt or something similar. That way you know from analysing your website statistics that every visitor who viewed that page came as a result of your advertising on the radio.
You might also advertise the following:
www.samplebusiness.com/tr for Television Advertising
www.samplebusiness.com/pt for Print Advertising
www.samplebusiness.com/et for Email advertising
With the success rates of traditional marketing so hard to measure, this is a simple method of seeing where you are getting the bang for your buck.
Tip: Keep a balance between finding an easy to remember page name for your target customers while simultaneously not making it so obvious ( eg www.samplebusiness.com/printadvert) that customers know what you are doing and realise they can drop the last part of the web address for the same result!
In the US, I have seen some businesses take it a step further and have completely separate domain names for different advertising channels instead of just different webpages:
Example:
www.70samplebusiness.com
www.88samplebusiness.com
This is a little more expensive but certainly easier to analyse web trends of each domain against one another.
