Making offline campaigns measurable [roadmap]

Offline campagnes meetbaar maken [stappenplan]

If you are using offline communication tools such as a brochure, flyer or a magazine, QR and NFC codes are the ideal way to take your audience from offline to your online world. Or place a QR or NFC tag on your products so your buyers can quickly get to the service page or online manual. The biggest challenge here is often measuring how well your offline campaigns actually perform. We have found a handy way to do this and you will discover it in this blog!

In 6 steps to measurable offline campaigns:

What is QR and NFC?

Now that almost every mobile phone has a QR scanner in the camera as standard, QR codes are the perfect way to bring your offline audience to your online world. QR codes are squares with black and white squares inside them that together form a code. You can easily scan this code with your phone to go to a video, a webpage, a landing page, a form, social media or something completely different.

Same goes for NFC codes. Although still not every phone has an NFC scanner, this is becoming more and more the standard. A tap of your phone against the tag will take you to the desired page, video or other content in no time.

In a QR and NFC code, you can store any kind of information, and this is what makes it such a great way to use in your printed materials, on your products or in your offline store.

Do you still want to be 100% sure that your offline visitors can easily continue in your online environment? Then always place a shortened URL with the QR or NFC tag. If scanning fails, someone can always simply enter the URL and enter your online world.

Best of all? You can also make this super easy to measure.

Learn more about quick scan methods QR and NFC? Find out in our blog about QR and NFC

Making your offline campaigns measurable

The only downside to offline campaigns is that you don't know exactly how many people end up converting through your offline expressions, something that is easily measurable for online. Even with QR and NFC codes, this often seems to be what stops organisations from actively deploying it. Someone who visits your platform via such a code is seen by statistics programmes like Google Analytics as a direct visitor. In other words, someone who has directly entered the URL of your webpage and thus arrived at this page. But you can certainly make QR and NFC codes and shortened URLs measurable and it only takes a few steps. Let's dive into it!

1. Create a landing page

In, say, the MODX CMS or the CMS you work with, create a page you want people to land on when they scan the code. This could be a page with specific information, call-to-action buttons for contacting you, a video about your company, more information about your products, you name it. When you save this page, you will be shown a URL where this page can be visited. Copy this URL.

You can, of course, also link to a YouTube video or your social media channels. If this is the case with you, you don't need to create a landing page. Just copy the URL of the video or link to your social post or channel.

2. Place the URL in a UTM builder

With a simple Google search, a UTM builder can be found in no time. At Sterc, we find this tool from Google Analytics very clear and useful:https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/. In addition, some software also have them integrated by default, such as HubSpot.

Place the copied URL in the appropriate field.

3. Add UTM labels

Under the field where you just placed your URL are a number of data fields that you can add to the URL, so that you know through which channels someone came to your landing page. Within each label, use short, clear descriptions.

For example, if you have a brochure where the QR will soon be found, fill in the fields as follows:

Source: Magazine

Medium: QR

Name: Winter_special

Please note!Create your own UTM URL for each channel. For example, are you using QR, NFC and a shortened URL? Then create your own UTM URL for each channel. So herewith a total of 3 different URLs. Where the medium is different each time.

4. Use the shortened URL tool

Some UTM builders offer the ability to instantly create a shortened URL, including the tool we recommended earlier in this blog and the tracking URL builder in HubSpot. This is handy because it makes your QR code a lot less complex and thus easier to scan. Does your UTM builder not have this feature? Then use tools like bitly.

5. Generate the QR or NFC tag

There are plenty of tools online to generate your QR or NFC tag. For example https://www.qrcode-monkey.com/. In the URL field, enter the shortened URL you generated in the previous step, so that you have the easiest QR code possible to scan.

Are you using MODX 3.0? If so, you can automatically generate a QR code by clicking on the dots in the top right of the desired page and choosing 'Download QR code'. MODX will then automatically generate a QR code with UTM tags, so Google Analytics will automatically actually see visitors coming in via your QR codes as QR visitors instead of direct visitors.

MODX also allows you to automatically generate an NFC tag. You can then send this to the printer so that they can nicely incorporate your NFC tag into any kind of material. Our tip: Tapp is the perfect printer to incorporate NFC tags into your offline promotional material.

6. Create a shortened URL

Might sound like a double step, but as we said earlier, it is useful to put a shortened URL under your QR or NFC tag so that actually anyone can visit your landing page. Of course, it's nice if this shortened URL shows your website name instead of a bit.ly link.

In order to measure how often people use the shortened URL instead of the QR or NFC tag, it is important to create a separate UTM URL for this, adjusting the medium to 'URL' or 'Direct'. This allows you to track within your campaign how each medium contributed to achieving your campaign goal.

In order for this shortened URL to show your own website name, you need to place the UTM URL for the shortened URL (with 'Direct' as the medium) in your CMS and create a new page with it. Within MODX, you can also create a web link instead of a page. Place the UTM URL in this and choose which URL you want to display here. For Sterc, for example, this would be sterc.com/hubspot-guide.

Do you still find your URL too long, for example, because you work with multiple languages or your landing page falls as a subpage under another page? Then MODX users can use Freeze URL - found under the MODX extra SEO Tab - to make the URL as short as they like.

Your offline campaigns in statistics

Finally, you can see the result of these campaigns in statistics programmes like Google Analytics. In current Google Analytics (UA) you can find this under acquisition > overview, here you will find all your running campaigns from Google Ads and other campaigns you have created. Then click on the appropriate 'source' and you will see the results of your offline campaigns. In the new Google Analytics 4, you can also find the results of your campaigns under acquisition > overview. Here, only the various sources, mediums and campaigns are listed together in one overview. If you specifically want to know more about one campaign, you can always click through.