4 Steps to Tracking Print Ads with Google Analytics

In digital marketing we understand the importance of tracking. We spend money getting people to our site with hopes they’ll do what we desire them to do and that we’ll learn something about how to improve our digital marketing efforts. While we’ve seen a consistent trend of print spend be allocated to digital spend, we often forget that print is still a channel worth understanding.  In fact, one study shows that print ads are more likely to engage users and prompt action. This begs the question, if print can be a strong channel, why don’t companies invest in it?

The answer is likely because companies are now used to understanding what their dollars are doing. When print, TV and billboards were the primary ad spots, attribution was not an easy task, but today companies have built a habit of understanding how much revenue is generated by their ad spend dollars thanks to the Internet and Google Analytics.

Currently when print ads list the website on the actual ad in the hopes that users will check out the company at home on their desktop, users usually do just that—they’re likely to type it into their browser. This would then mean that the traffic is classified as Direct, which is not a fun traffic source to analyze or understand in Analytics. Or maybe the user does a Google search for the brand and clicks on one of their pages in the search results, which would classify the traffic as Organic Search. Unfortunately, both of these metrics are wrong. The print ad should get the credit for bringing the user to the site. So how can we track these print ads digitally?

To help make sure you can track your print ads digitally in Google Analytics so that you can better analyze the success of your ads, here is the easy four-step process:

Decide on a vanity URL

Most print ads include a domain name or URL, but if you want to know which website visitors saw this ad you’ll need a vanity URL. Vanity URL’s are unique, short and/or simple URL that demonstrates the brand or ad campaign. For example if the company EntoBento, a San Diego based dog treat company, ran a promotional ad in Time Magazine, the vanity URL might be “entobento.com/time”. You can learn more about creating a vanity URL here.

Create and apply UTM parameters to the landing page URL for the ad

UTM parameters are tracking codes appended to the end of a URL that allow you to customize your tracking sources. You can use the Google UTM builder to create the tracking URL for the ad in just a few minutes.

Continuing with the previous example, the tracking URL for EntoBento’s ad might look like:

entobento.com/?utm_source=time%20magazine&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=promo

We got this URL by using the UTM builder mentioned above. We simply plugged in the URL of our website and the tool generated this new URL with UTM parameters for us.

Redirect the vanity URL to a URL with custom UTM parameters

This part is a little technical.  A developer will have to create a redirect to send traffic from your vanity URL to the tracking URL. This means, taking the example from above once again: entobento.com/time would redirect to entobento.com/?utm_source=time%20magazine&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=promo).

Check Google Analytics real-time reports

After the redirect is setup, paste your vanity URL into the browser to test the redirect and that the UTM is working properly.  Open Google Analytics and navigate to Real-Time reports on the left side. Select traffic sources to confirm you see the tracking. Below is a screenshot of what the report looks like:

Why It Matters: The Benefit of Tracking Print Ads Via Google Analytics

By implementing print ad tracking you’re reducing the amount of traffic that is wrongly classified as Direct or Organic search and gaining insight into how your different print efforts are working. With this practice you will be beyond most companies who do print advertising with little understanding of how their ad performs.

Extra: This same process can be applied on your business cards, handouts, fliers, billboards, stickers, or your banner at an event / tradeshow. Wouldn’t that be interesting to see how much handout traffic you get? Or what the bounce rate is on your business cards? Get creative. If your business is using print, don’t be scared to track it digitally.

Do you have experience with tracking print ads through Google Analytics? Let us know if you have any questions or thoughts in the comment section below.