Measuring online marketing campaigns was always possible but measurement of offline marketing to understand how it affects the online visibility of a particular company was a challenge.
But now this gap is almost filled by the introduction of QR codes, seen by most of us in magazines, newspapers, TV commercials etc.
QR code or “quick response” is the code which can be easily scanned by mobile devices and quickly direct the person to the required website. This code helps in accessing the resource instantly. This way we can measure how offline campaign is leading traffic to online platforms.
But how will we attribute the visits coming from QR code to a particular website? It is as simple as campaign analytics and be easily done using URL builder, provided by Google for Google analytics users.
Here are some steps which will help us track visitors through QR codes:
1. To make a QR code one has to provide a URL, which the visitor will visit after scanning the QR code.
2. Once the Landing URL is fixed, now it’s the time to append the query parameter to that particular URL. For this we’ll use the Google URL builder tool:
(In the above example, the QR code will be generated for webanalyticsindia.com)
Google URL builder will ask for the above shown fields to be filled. Fields like source, medium and campaign name are mandatory to fill.
Here the source will be Newspaper and the medium ‘QRcode’, hence the campaign name-‘WAI QRcode campaign’.
Once this is complete, the tool will provide the URL with query parameters.
3. This is the last step and here the URL created above has to be submitted to a QR code generator. This will create the Code which can be added to the offline campaigns. Some of the sites which can be used for generating the QR code are:
(sample QR code)
Once the code is created and is printed in the newspaper, the data can be easily seen in the Google Analytics account of that particular site. It will be under the ‘Traffic Sources’ section under the name of ‘All Traffic Sources’.
On clicking the ‘All Traffic Sources’, the data can be selected on the basis of ‘Medium’ or ‘Source’ and hence the visits can be easily attributed to the QR code campaign.
It is as simple as that 
This is very good information but we can also place the url created by URL builder into the section of Goal page. Exact head match of url.. is this right?