College Web Development

Jump to Comments

Tracking marketing campaigns is the basics of the basics but the marketing department is not doing it!

There are a number of ways to track a marketing campaign including using different phone numbers and websites. In this post I will touch on the importance of tracking and how to do it with the web. All this information will help you make the most out of your advertising budget.

In the beginning God created marketing

Marketing is essential in today’s business word, we all know that. But the huge gap between marketing departments and technology needs to close. This does not mean marketing needs to use technology as a medium to market; that is being done already. What it does mean is marketing needs to consult with IT to understand the numbers behind their advertisements.

Then God created things that can be measured

• E-mail’s
• Postcards
• Brochures
• Billboards
• Any ad with a call to action

Then god designed a way to measure each of these

All electronic ads like e-mail and pay per click ads can be measured by adding code to the links placed in the adds. If you use Google analytics and Google ad words than you do not need to add any code but you do for e-mails.

How to track e-mails

You want to tag links that are in your e-mails. Google has a good bit of information on how to tag links in their help files. Google also has a URL builder for quick easy URL creation.

How to track non electronic ads

This is all dependent on your call to action, but lets start with the basic idea that you send out postcards with phone numbers on it. Use a unique phone number for that post card so that the number of calls can be tracked.

Tracking using unique URLs

Basically you buy a URL for each piece of advertisement ( billboard, brochure …) and you have the URL redirect to the content you want the user to see.

Example: you want an ad campaign based around your new integrated studies degree. It is obviously terrible to design a billboard with the url, www.yourcollege.edu/integratedstudies. So you purchase is.yourcollege.com which is not the best URL but stick with me. In your hosting you have the URL redirect to

http://www.yourcollege.edu/integratedstudies?utm_source=integrated%2Bstudies&utm_medium=Billboard&utm_campaign=IS%2Bcampaign

I got that URL from the URL builder, the URL will tell Google Analytics that the visitor came from seeing your billboard.

And on the seventh day god rested while the ads were optimized.

Now that you can track all your ads, what can you do to improve them? Well start off with brochures, postcards and e-mail. Create 3 versions of each and send them out to a small portion of your mailing list, each with a unique tracking feature. I.e. for brochures and postcard each version needs its own URL, where the e-mail can use the same link just different campaign information. After a couple weeks see which brochure resulted in the most visitors to your site. Than send that one out to all the rest of your list. No more guessing what is the best way to design a postcard, you can now have measurable results to base your decisions on.