Case study: tracking print materials in Google Analytics
The most significant advantage of digital marketing over non-digital marketing is the ability to measure all sorts of things, like user behavior, acquisition channels, and so on. Measures give us insights into our audiences, and how they behave, they help us focus our marketing efforts in the right direction.
In this case study, we will go through the process of measuring the print campaign. I will talk about how we connected a print campaign with our web page. So, let’s dive in!
About the company
My company operates in a B2B market where it sells IT consulting and cloud management services. We are one of a few companies in Croatia that sell Amazon Web Services, also knows as AWS. The most significant advantage of using AWS cloud services is the ability to cut the cost of running IT services. AWS offers a broad range of IT services that help clients solve all sorts of IT challenges. They have solutions aimed at IoT, robotics, AR & VR, blockchain, machine learning, and so on.
The goals
Our campaign has two goals:
- Spreading awareness of our company as a cloud provider and AWS partner, and positioning ourselves as a premium provider
- Collecting leads for three targeted audiences
Segmentation
Segmentation is essential to understand your audience and to create meaningful marketing communication. Segmentation in the B2B world is a bit different and more complicated than in B2C. We need to understand the structure of the company where the decision-making process is far more complicated than the one in the customer market. When we talk about IT services, often, the users of the services are not the decision-makers. Decision is made on a higher level where usually managers are more concerned about the cost than on the technical advantages.
We target companies that use high end IT services. For this campaign, we created targeted three types of companies:
- Enterprises — large companies with at least 70 employees and 50 million in yearly revenue
- IT companies — Medium-sized IT companies
- SME — small to medium-sized companies with at least ten employees
For each of these groups, we created a slightly different communication.
- Enterprises — we focused our communication on cloud migration, and how these companies can benefit from migration to AWS cloud.
- IT companies — we focused our communication DevOps services, and how these companies can benefit from deployment automation. The goal of these services is to eliminate errors when deploying new code to production.
- SME — we focused our communication on the general benefits of cloud as a technology.
Print materials
As I said in the previous section, we had different communication for each of the groups we targeted. For each of these companies, we created high-quality flyers with QR codes. All of the flyers have a custom made envelope and a coupon code that looks like a credit card. The whole experience feels very premium. Our printing partner was amazed by the complexity of the entire print production job and the result we are trying to achieve. Each flyer has a QR code on the outside and inside. We gave a coupon code to each company; for example, an enterprise company has an ENTER000001 coupon code. This coupon code is built into the URL by using UTM parameters in the following way:
- utm_source — offline
- utm_medium — flyer
- utm_campaign — AWS flyer
- utm_term — ENT001
- utm_content — flyer front or flyer inside
URL was shortened and converted into a QR code that was printed on the flyer. With this URL structure, we know when someone scanned the code and visited a web page.
Landing pages
The same as for print materials, each of the groups, has its landing page. The communication on the LP follows the print flyer with even more information on benefits for the company. Each landing page has a contact form, where people can contact us by using a coupon code. Together with UTM tracking, we also implemented custom events in Google Analytics. Our webpage is custom-built, and the only way to implement custom events is to use the GA API. Fortunately, GA API is simple to use, and it is easy to implement in custom applications. When a form on our site is submitted, we send the “conversion” event to GA; that way, we can later track how many people that scanned the QR code actually contacted us.
Reporting
For reporting, we use Google Analytics and Google Data studio. By default, GA gives us a set of reports where we can track user behavior. We implemented one more report that we use to track only this campaign. GD studio needs a bit more work; we use it to create custom reports that help us to have a simple overview of our campaign.
Wrapping it all up
It’s not easy, but it is possible to track print campaigns. The goal is to create meaningful communication for the target audience. On the flyer and the website, the focus is on the CTA-a. The flyer has a QR code as a CTA; the website has a simple contact form as a CTA.
For the user, the whole experience is very premium, straightforward, and intuitive. It’s effortless for the user to scan the code and enter data. For us, the reporting part is essential. We want to track as much as possible. With the segmentation in the beginning, we created a good structure that we can track.
I hope this was helpful to everyone and that I managed to explain the whole process.
