One great idea for catalog businesses going online

We're in the thick of working on our monthly digital analysis reports here at Napykn. At this point, we're bringing together ideas developed from last month's reports, looking at the most recent month's data and refining our techniques based on our readings from numerous online sources.

Recently, we've been working with a few catalog-based companies who are increasingly shifting their focus into online sales. One proven segmenting technique that we've been recommending to these clients is to register alternate domain names and direct their catalog-based traffic to these domains.

It's not a new idea. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of landing page optimization will tell you to register a particular domain name in order to draw in a particular group of visitors. But in the case of catalogers, we're using it to segment their traffic into two sources:

• Visitors who use the website to make orders based on the catalog, and;
• Visitors who found the website through other means (organic or paid search, referring sites, etc.)

For example, a catalog company with the domain redfiretrucks.com also distributes a catalog. In the catalog itself, suggest to readers that they visit redfiretruckscatalog.com (and then it can be as simple as just redirecting the traffic - or you can do more interesting things with behavioral targeting). This way, we will know which website visitors have read the catalog, and which visitors are a product of the company's online marketing efforts.

For $10-$15 per year, registering an additional domain name is a small investment to help give some order to the chaos of your online traffic.