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You're the Guest Blogger: Google Analytics Stories from the Trenches
September 22, 2006
A couple of days ago, I pointed out a ClickZ article which discussed how a New York-based retailer (BuiltNY) tracks their print campaign with Google Analytics. Later in my post I asked for YOUR success stories.
Well the very next morning I heard from Terry Howard, owner of a fishing community site for Central Florida.
Here's Terry's story:
I work on a new project starting up that is a fishing community site for Central Florida.We wanted to use business cards to place at bait shops, marinas, sub shops, wherever.
In order to track how successful these are we used our abbreviated domain cflfr.com instead of our primary centralfloridafishingreport.com on the cards and I set up a 301 redirect that is triggered whenever the short url is accessed and there is no referrer data sent.
This redirect sends type in traffic of that domain to our homepage with a tracking variable "?ref=offline" tacked on the end.
Now we can simply go into analytics under dynamic content, find the tracking URL page views and check conversion rates.
We can also do a crossview on the city stats to get roughly how we converted at specific card drop locations and even determine the range our cards have, like if people picked them up at one of our location and then took them home to a city across the state to look up our site at home.
Very cool!
Terry, great looking website by the way and great Google Analytics battlefield story. Send me your address and I'll mail a gift card for dinner for you and the Mrs.
Anyone else want to guest blog about how you're using Google Analytics successfully and get some free exposure for your website (and a PR5 link)?
Drop me a line and I'll publish your story if you've got your own good-great example.
Interested in learning more about Google Analytics?
Attend our LIVE Google Analytics Seminars for Success training in Atlanta, GA Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 and Thursday, April 15th, 2010 or get the latest tips and tricks sent to you via our free, twice-monthly Google Analytics newsletter.
