These Apples Taste Like Oranges: Online and Offline Channel Comparison
| Sandra Elliott
The problem: People think it’s impossible to compare online channels with offline channels using web analytics tools. But that’s simply not true. It is possible — oh yes, indeed — and the insights are awesome!
In fact, as long as you have the right people in the room in your campaign planning stages, you can use Webtrends to track any campaign — online or off — as long as the campaign is designed to have people hit a page that you own.
Few companies I’ve talked to are doing this today, but the interest is really strong.
Give Me An Easy Example
Here’s one: Let’s say you work at a university that’s trying to determine what kind of new programs to offer on their north and south campuses. You bought some billboard space on the streets around campus.
Now, bring your web developers into the discussion, and they’ll tell you that two distinct vanity URLs can be used to redirect people to the same poll site using different campaign identifiers:
- University.edu/North redirects to university.edu/polls/newprograms2010.htm, but appends the Webtrends campaign parameter with the value “northcampus.”
- University.edu/South also redirects to the same webpage, but with the value “southcampus.”
You can also do the same thing with online campaigns. Emails to students at the north campus can include the parameter and value “northemail,” and those to the south campus, “southemail.”
That Was Too Easy
Okay. We can make it a lot more complicated. For example, maybe these north and south campus campaigns actually have a lot of different attributes:
| Campaign ID | Demand Channel | Partner | Date | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| northcampus | billboard | Billboard Co | 1-Dec | Tell us. |
| southcampus | billboard | Billboard Co. | 3-Dec | Your ideas here. |
| northemail | internal | 8-Dec | Poll | |
| southemail | internal | 9-Dec | Poll | |
| northevent | offline event | Events ‘R Us | 12-Dec | Holiday Open House |
| southevent | offline event | Events ‘R Us | 15-Dec | Meet The Chancellor |
All you have to do is get your administrator to use this table – which we call a “lookup table” – and you can get a custom drilldown report that rolls up on any of these attributes.
Want to know the returns of offline versus online demand channels? Done. Need to look at return based on partners? Definitely. Don’t care about anything except the campaign IDs? Heck, that’s really easy! In fact, it’s pretty much an automatic report, once your campaigns have been tagged.
Webtrends handles it all — not just the online stuff.
I can’t do the subject full justice here, so let me point you to a really cool presentation about how Kettle Foods used Webtrends to do something just like this. It’s about 20 minutes long, but if you’re only interested in the case study, skip to slide 11 (the one that says “Kettle Foods” on it). It’s a smart campaign tracked in a really smart way.
I’d love to see more examples of this kind of tracking, especially if you’re willing to let me share them here or in my classes. So let me hear from you!
Anyone have a campaign they’d like to show off?