Forum Moderators: DixonJones
They're now beginning to move onto the web, and want to track visitors to their website from direct mail.
Thinking out loud...
If we did nothing special... no custom urls, for example... I assume that we'd be subject to the limitations of what we can discover via server logs. Visitors who typed in the url, as I understand it, could be distinguished from visitors who came via search, but not from visitors who used bookmarks or links.
If we set up custom urls, though, since people would be typing these in, we'd have to keep them simple. My guess is that from the user point of view, we'd almost want unique domain names like: www.domain123.com... I'd guess that anything more complex would lose inexperienced web users. I'm not even sure that a subdomain like www.123.domain.com would be sufficiently user-friendly, though it would be easier to set up.
Continuing to think out loud... I feel it's important to avoid the hassle of multiple or mirror sites... so it would be nice if domain123.com, eg, could redirect to the main domain, ie, to domain.com. The only clean way I can think of doing this would be via a 301.
If a 301 is used, though, can tracking software detect that domain123.com was accessed and can it follow the visitor through?
All thoughts and suggestions welcome. I should mention that I know very little about servers, so answers will need to have simple as well as technical explanations. ;)
An alternative to all this might be to poll site visitors who finally became customers and find out how they came to the site... and then to extrapolate from that.
[webmasterworld.com...]
What I have seen offline is either
www.example.com/special/ - the folder contains the offer information and is only available from direct type ins (no links).
www.specialexample.com - a special domain is set up. Usually the last option because your conversion rate will not cover the expense.
questionnaire at check out - probably should be included no matter what you go with.
Others may have better suggestions. I have done print (including direct mail) and radio ads and seen almost 0 increase in traffic. The only direct mail that seems to have any effect is email or spam.
Thanks... this is very helpful, as was the other thread.
There's also a recent thread about newspaper advertising on which I posted that "You can't click on a newspaper..." so I'm in agreement about print advertising.
Print advertising isn't really the question here, though. The company is already sending out the (printed) direct mailings with custom phone-numbers, and they want to track the url info they include as well.
