How do I test the effectiveness of my Newspaper Ad for my online store?

The best way to find out is to create a special URL which is unique to your Newspaper Ad, which people will type in directly in response to seeing it.

So for example, you could create a URL which provides some kind of incentive to type it in, like this: https://www.yourdomainname.com.au/freeshipping

This will then redirect to your free shipping offer page.

https://www.yourdomainname.com.au/product-cateogry/product1-free-shipping.html

You might need to get your developer to help set up the redirect if your CMS doesn’t support it.

To really see what’s going on in Analytics, you’ll need to add some campaign tracking script to the end of your link above (your destination URL).

To do this, visit Google’s Campaign URL Builder. Don’t get scared off, this is really easy.

Here’s an example:

What you’ll get is a link that looks like this (where the campaign tracking information is added automatically to the end of the link):

https://www.yourdomainname.com.au/product-cateogry/product1-free-shipping.html?utm_source=Sydney-Morning-herald&utm_medium=Print&utm_campaign=Free-Shipping

If you don’t add this additional code to your URL, you won’t be able to tell whether someone came through via your Print Ad (or any other channel for that matter, Twitter, Facebook, etc – and ideally links from those channels should also be tracked).

Then, to see a report in analytics you’ll need to go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns.

Then voila!

Over time, this report will tell you how many people came from your Print Ad.

Here’s how it looks:

Select “Source” to sort your campaign by the sources you have defined.

In the above example screenshot, you can see that Print was responsible for 153 visits during the period.

This will really help you understand how your print campaign is performing against other campaign channels.

You can get much more granular information if you create goals, or have eCommerce enabled analytics tracking, as you can then see revenue generated based on each campaign channel.

This is going to help your online sales because you’ll begin to understand where your advertising budget is best spent.

So simple.

More information is available here.

For more Online Sales expert advice, click here.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.