Making Multiple Printed Coupons More Trackable

I was visiting a plumbing website the other day and on the home page I saw this offer of various printable coupons.

When you click the link at the bottom you get a PDF with all the coupons, which you then print, cut out the one(s) you want, and then present when you buy a service.

Great idea, but there are a couple things I’d do differently.

Knowing where someone got a coupon is very important for tracking the effectiveness of your various marketing efforts. Assuming that this version of the PDF is not available anywhere else on the web or sent out to customers via email, then the printed versions of the coupons would be identifiable as having come from the website.

Still, I wouldn’t leave anything to chance, so I’d put some code on the coupon that tells you it came from the website.

It would be even more helpful to have additional statistical information from these coupon offers, and that only takes a little bit of extra work.  Here are some things I’d like to know:

• When did people download the coupon they present?
  You simple change the PDF, say, each month (even if they’re the same coupons) and code the coupons so you know roughly when they were downloaded and printed. Based on the date when they purchase the service, you know the interval between getting the coupon and using it.
• How many people looked at the coupon offer?
  Statistics will tell us how many clicked on the PDF, but how may people were interested in the offers and looked at them, but never clicked. If we make the coupon offers a separate page, we can track views of the offer alone. 
• Which coupons did people want to print off in particular?
  Since all the coupons are on a single PDF, we only know they downloaded all the coupons, but have no idea if they were interested in just some and which ones. If we make each coupon a separate PDF, we can track which get downloaded the most.
• What is the relationship between downloading a coupon and using it?
  Having each coupon downloaded separately gives us a statistic to measure against how people actually used that particular coupon. For instance, many people might be attracted by a free camera pipe inspection, but a higher percentage actually use the coupon for $100 off a service.

While there are other, more sophisticated ways to track printed coupons, they tend to cost money or be more technical to implement – these are ideas anyone can easily put into practice today.