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New York-Based Retailer BuiltNY Tracks Print Campaign with Google Analytics
September 20, 2006
Earlier this year ROI Revolution's Michael Harrison wrote a very useful post for marketers who wanted to track their offline (print, radio, TV, etc) ads using Google Analytics.
Yesterday, Kevin Newcomb (writing on the ClickZ network), wrote how New York-based retailer BuiltNY actually implemented this and agreed to be interviewed about it:
To track the print campaign, BuiltNY put a unique, easy-to-remember unique URL in the ad, which was only in use for that campaign. That landing page shows colorful x-ray images of objects like wine bottles, lunches, seashells and beach gear, all inside the appropriate BuiltNY bag.Through Google Analytics, BuiltNY was able to attribute an 800 percent boost in traffic when the ad hit newsstands, and a 40 percent increase in online sales from visitors that came through that URL, Steve Bowden, art director for BuiltNY, told ClickZ.
"We can read it like the Wall Street Journal for our own Web traffic," Bowden said. "Every morning we get an update on how our Web, print and e-mail campaigns are doing, correlated to sales."
"Instead of gathering around the table scratching our heads, we actually have data to show how the campaign is performing," added Aaron Lown, a principal at BuiltNY and its co-creative director.
and finally, check this subsequent paragraph out (sound familiar?):
BuiltNY ran a more traditional test ad in Dwell earlier this year, before it began using Google Analytics. "But I have no idea if it worked," Lown said, since he had no way to track its success. Prior to implementing Google Analytics about the same time the X-ray campaign began, BuiltNY hadn't used any Web analytics products for its first three years in business. "We just had too many other things to do, like design new products, run our business...," Lown said.
Who else has used Google Analytics to track a print or otherwise offline advertising campaign? Write to me and if you've got a good case I'll post it here.
Interested in learning more about Google Analytics?
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Comments
Chris,
Very interesting stuff about the PPM, and yes I remember reading your post about this last March.
While I'm not aware of the source of your 90% figure, we did blog about a way to track an offline effort using a firm's commonly used top-level domain coupled with an unique sub-directory (I do see rather large companies using this method in print and in TV spots):
http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2006/02
/how_to_track_offline_ads_with_google_analytics.html
Finally, let's just say for the sake of argument that your 90% figure is entirely accurate based on the universe of marketing spend (with the biggest part of the 90% of the spend contributed by a rather small number of very *large* companies), then perhaps a more sophisticated solution such as the Arbitron PPM *is* the most desired solution for these very large companies.
Lean, nimble, and budget conscious firms (BuiltNY for example) can still use one of the two methods we have advocated in an analytics program which is free for all.
Check out tomorrow's "guest blogger" blog posting for another real-life example from another guerilla 10%'er.
Sounds very interesting, but the only problem is that 90% of offline marketing is done by marketers for whom sending traffic to a different, campaign-specific top-level domain is neither possible nor desired.
Efforts like Apollo and the Arbitron Portable People meter need to gather steam, prove themselves and spawn ubiquitous cell-phone based tracking of offline media consumption before this really gets interesting:
http://searchquant.blogspot.com/
2006_03_01_searchquant_archive.html
September 21, 2006 6:26 PM