Website and Magazine Ad's - how to track? Does it work?

[pmkpmk]

There's two types of printed advertising in magazines. The most common type simply puts "www.company.com" on the ad. But more and more often I see "www.company.com/xy" as the web-address, where "xy" often is the abbreviation for the magazines name and/or issue number.

It's a temtping idea to track visibility of printed advertising via special web-adresses. But - does it actually work? Do the reader really type in the WHOLE address or do they assume that "www.company.com" will get them to the right place as well?

Any best practice? Any live feedback? Any do's and don'ts?

[DaveN]

they do if your if the url is

www.xyz.com/ad_special or www.xyz.com/ad_prices

or

ad.xyz.com also works

but we tend to register extra domain-names to cover each mag (we don't care about initial brand awareness we take care of that on-site)

dave

[Jenstar]

I agree with DaveN - many people are lazy and they won't type in www.domain.com/magname/ but just www.domain.com - if tracking the advertising methods is a neccessity, register the extra domain names so you can track them properly.

I often wonder why affiliate marketers bother to advertise in magazines with www.theirsite.com/myreferralid/ because I am sure they are losing plenty of sales when people just typing in the www.theirsite.com. For $8.95 people can register a domain and forward it to their affiliate link if they want . In most cases, I am sure the $8.95 more than covers the potential lost sales.

[pmkpmk]

For us it's rather trying to track what magazines are "worth" for printed ads, and where we can save money by NOT placings ads anymore.

[Jenstar]

If you are trying to decide that, your best bet would be to register domains for each magazine, so it could be an accurate reporting of there the business came from. Using www.domain.com/xyz won't give as true a reporting as www.domainxyz.com will.

[pmkpmk]

I have a few "spare" domains, but actually I'm trying to set up a brand name. I'm a bit reluctant to water this by not using www.company.com anymore.

What about the suggestion earlier in this thread to use abc.company.com, xyz.company.com for the different mags?

[Jenstar]

Yes, that is a better solution than a www.yourdomain.com/xyz/. Be sure to put an http:// in front though - there are many people who won't recognize a WWW URL if it doesn't begin with www., even if it has the .com on the end. If you are advertising in an online technical magazine, you don't need the http:// but if it is a lawn and garden magazine, you should add http:// to be on the safe side.

[georgeek]

Have you thought of promotional codes? There has to be a small incentive and the user enters the code once on the site, a different code for each ad of course. Once you have set up the collection and stats programing it can work very well. One of my clients is forever advertising in regional media. They just enter the newest promotional code via an admin page and the data is collected in the stats program. They can look at an admin/stats page with a matrix of promo codes by dates and count.

One thing that always amazes me is the number of users who read magazines several months old.

[pmkpmk]

Our products are in the 14-45 K$ range. Incentives will probably not work on these price-regions since we do almost no online-sales.

[Jbrookins]

well, here we've found that if you use an incentive name, people tend to type the whole thing.
ie www.yourdomain.com/special.htm or discount.htm.

If people think they're getting something special by adding a few characters, they'll often do it. Still not a 100% thing, but what is?

Other than using alternate domains, incentivized URLs are probably your only option.