The Netflow

Websites in Offline Directories…

We’ve all, at one time or another, needed to find a phone number of a local tradesman, or business. Now, the first thing I do is google it. However, before the advent of google, the first thing you picked up was the golden pages or some other local directory. Even now, alot of local businesses just dont have a web presence so the only way to find them is through the Golden Pages. And even the companies that do have a web presence, can’t totally cut their directory listsings as many people’s first port of call is still the local directory.

Recently however, that has started to change. More and more companies (especially companies that conduct their business mostly online) have been foregoing a listing in the local offline directories and even the national directories like the golden pages. This is because they believe it is impossible to tell whether they have achieved anything from their ad in the golden pages. They don’t have the same transparency that they get from their visitors coming from Google, Digg or Twitter.

I believe this trend is largely similar to what we are seeing in other industries like advertising. A large number of advertisers are focusing on the forms of advertising where they can easily track their results. This is why big online ad companies like google aren’t seeing the huge hits in revenue that printed advertisers are seeing.

However, just the other day, during a discussion someone asked me if it was possible to find out how much traffic was coming from these offline resources. And although it might take a little bit of work I think it might be possible to tell. All you really need is a little creativity and some way to track your websites statistics – like Google Analytics.

The easiest way, first off, if you haven’t already run the ad, is to use a slightly different URL for your offline ad. I’d even go as far as to suggest a different domain. You can then redirect from this URL to you normal address with little or no fuss. You can then easily work out numbers coming from offline resources. And even if for some reason your offline URL is being used somewhere online, you’ll nearly always have a referrer. Since all of your ‘offline’ customers, will show as a direct connections, you can work out whether your offline ads are worth it. I believe a number of companies already do this. However it seems to be more tailored to specific advertising campaigns then to particular ads but the premise is still valid. You’ll often see companies like Coca-Cola have a different URL on certain ads – A different URL for each campaign. Its a way of seeing how successful a particular campaign was. I’m sure huge advertising companies have completed studies that are able to work out the number of people who actually see an ad from the number of people that actively go out and type out the URL, however this is beyond my means as a one man development team. Plus in our case, only the people that use the URL are important as they are potential sales, or offers, or whatever it is that you do. Coca-Cola also have the luxury of being able to correlate sales to campaigns, and I’m sure have very intelligent statisticians working it out for them.

This is not always going to work though. And it’s not always good in every situation. One situation where I’d advise against providing users with a different domain, is when the brand is ultra important and you’re trying to create brand loyalty. While its ok for Susan who owns and graphic design company to have a couple of domains, as its her name and work that is important not exact brand recognition. And its definitely ok for a huge brand like Coca-Cola because they already have all the brand recognition that they’re going to get. If you have to keep the exact brand, you could offer your offline resourses a slightly different landing page. In the offline ad list http://example.com/golden as your domain name. Again this has a couple of problems in that it has a much better chance of being found in the wrong manner and if that happens it might take a lot of effort to work out the approx numbers coming from offline resources.

As I pointed out earlier, Coca-Cola have correlation between sales and ad campaigns as a perfect measurement of ad success. If you’re deciding whether to drop that offline ad and suspect its doing absolutely nothing for you then the easiest thing you can do is drop the ad and see if there is a correlation between the amount of work you lose. Risky, especially if you’re wrong. But in certain businesses you’re going to be able to do this with very little risk.

One last thing to take into consideration however is demographics. And what a huge thing to throw in at the end. I could have written a whole post about demographics and will do so in the future. The key is to think about what your normal customer is. Are they an old couple from a rural town? Don’t bother with the web (unless of course you’re looking to change your normal customers – again depends on the business). Are they young “bebo-ers”? Don’t bother with offline directories – They’ve never picked up the golden pages. You need to look at your customers and work out who who want or need to target and work out your advertising from there. Not the other way round.

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Tags: Advertising, Brand, Business, Coca-Cola, Google, Google Analytics, Search Engines, Searching, Twitter, Yellow Pages