Tip: Measure TV Ads Effectiveness with Google Analytics

Are you curious to know exactly how effective your TV ad campaigns are, but have not been tracking your TV campaigns with unique phone numbers or URLs? Worry no more. In addition to the TV Campaigns reports discussed in this post, Google Analytics offers two great ways to track your TV campaign effectiveness.

1. Direct Traffic Report
When your customers type your URL directly into their browser, this traffic is classified as direct traffic. All of the TV viewers who type your website URL into their browsers will fall into this category. Therefore, it is important to monitor how your direct traffic is influenced during the time of your active TV campaign.

To access the Direct Traffic report, log in to Google Analytics and choose Traffic Sources -> Direct Traffic. Make sure you select the date range that corresponds to your active TV campaign. The example below features data from a real campaign, and you can see that there is a clear lift in traffic when the TV campaign was running (shown with green labels).

(Click the image for a full-size version)

2. Non-paid search traffic
Your customers may search for your company or product on their favorite search engine instead of visiting your website directly. To get a more complete picture of the effect of your Google TV campaign, it's important to monitor your non-paid search traffic as well. Non-paid search traffic is traffic that originates from the natural search results of search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. These visitors are accounted for in the Search Engines report.

To access your non-paid search traffic, login to Google Analytics and choose Traffic Sources -> Search Engines. Then click the "non-paid" link to filter out any paid traffic from the engines. In the example below, you can see a noticeable increase in non-paid search traffic on days with active TV Ads (shown with green labels).

(Click the image for a full-size version)

We hope this post provides you with some simple and powerful tools to measure the effectiveness of your Google TV Ads campaign.

Posted by David Wurtz, Associate Product Manager for Google TV Ads