So SEW (and several other folks) pointed to a study today from Comscore & Google that shows a very high percentage of Internet surfing results in a latent, offline purchase. From Chris Sherman:
...25% of product-related searches resulted in purchases, with 63% occurring in brick and mortar retailers, compared with 37% from online merchants. The study has similar findings to a Yahoo-sponsored ComScore study in December 2004, which found that 92 percent of purchases related to consumer electronics occurred offline...
For those marketers who measure conversion rates only on the web, a vast chasm exists between tracking and actual results. So how do you measure offline conversions? There's no cookie you can attach to a human being or their credit card and asking salespeople (whether it's B2B transactions or consumer activity) to collect the information provides lackluster results.
The methodology has to lie in comparitive analysis - checking sales figures for Internet promotions and visits against increases in offline sales. With the proper tracking in place, you can see side-by-side comparisons of visitor analytics showing traffic to a particular page (or section) and analyze sales figures over time to determine where the increases are coming from.
Offline tracking, however, provides intangible data and if done consistently, can be especially time consuming and expensive. Hence, it becomes wise to eventually cheat :)
By cheating, I'm referring to using previous data to predict and measure new trends. For example, if you already know that putting a Seagate hard drive on your homepage results in a 5% click-through to that product and boosts in-store sales by 5%, you can go ahead and put a new product there, measure click-throughs and predict what in-store sales boost you'll get. Don't forget to refine and test your analytics system, but this "poor man's" method can be handy in a pinch.
Anyone out there run online campaigns and track offline conversions?
As a B & M we've learned over time that a combination of viral marketing (word of mouth) and access to the web site is extremely powerful.
Historically, word of mouth leads always generated the highest percentage of conversions to sales. We encourage referrals and tested a little combo word of mouth/web access program. We are redoing this. It works very well.
This is more of a question than a comment. I am trying to find a turnkey solution for implimenting an analytics tracking program into offline cd-rom presentations, and am looking for some suggestions if anyone has seen any.
I have looked pretty extensively and haven't really found one.
Any feed back would be great. Thanks.
ClickPath, the company I work for, does it. Well we can bridge the gap and track phone calls back to the exact keyword or online ad that generated them. We use DNI, dynamic number insertion, to track all your calls from your website back to the keyword that generated the call. Our DNI allows us to use a small pool of toll free numbers to track an endless amount of keywords. The TFN's are rotated and dynamically inserted on your site where your phone number is and when a call comes through we capture the information. We then provide you with both the conversion analytics of which of your keywords generate calls and which don't, as well with call information such as a recording of the call, what keyword and ad outlet the call came from, and the address, phone number, name of the caller.
The DNI is the real driving force behind this ability. It uses an intuitive algorithm, that ClickPath created and patented, to insert numbers on to the website and get the one keyword to TFN granularity without the cost of having a TFN for every keyword you bid on.
JB
Yeah, we have used a combination of online and offline data to create tracking. Surveys we conduct offline give us insight into what visitor behaviors online typically lead to offline conversion. Then we can categorize visitors that take the action online into a "likely to buy" category. But it is as David says, you have to merge elements of both the online and offline data to create a complete picture.
Like many analytics efforts, measuring the impact of web marketing effort requires stitching together data from multiple sources - both quantitative (i.e. web site clicktrail) and qualitative (surveys, etc.) For bricks & mortar outfits, don't overlook the old school method of using exit surveys as people leave the store. True, there's a nontrivial cost associated with stationing an employee outside the door, asking folks as they leave "excuse me, did you make your in-store purchase after researching online, on our website or otherwise?" But, this additional data can go a long way towards understanding how visitors behave offline and what motivates them to buy.
David - good to see you here. Good points, too, about the use of exit surveys. I think that for many big re/e-tailers (Office Depot, Best Buy, Walmart), that can carry a lot of value.
I think most eTailers track online to offline conversions. While it might be a bit hard for WalMart to do so, companies like Victoria Secret can have a unique phone number on the website (as opposed to other advertising campaigns) to track call/conversions rates. They can also ask when you check out at a B&M if today's purchase decision was made in part by visiting their website (something VS asked my GF just last week, which is why I'm using them as an example). I've also seen a couple of eTailers who even use a different phone number based on the referral.
There's a flip-side to this coin as well, and that is tracking your online visitors to your offline promotional efforts. Vanity domains (best) or entering a code or going to a sub-url (www.website.com/offer15 -- in other words, a PITA) are various ways of handling this. We use these the vanity domain solution every week on our e-sites, and its given us very valuable insights into what works and what doesn't. Custom landing pages based on those vanity domains has also helped increase conversions (tying the print, radio or tv message to a landing page works wonders).
Good subject.. you know if you say something about conversions ole Dave and I will make our way to say something hehe
S
One simple method which works well is to give a reference to clients as soon as they fill in a form over your website. If this lead translates to a telephone sale then it can be traced right back to an original web enquiry.
How about this? Track the user with a cookie - including all session and referrer info. When a sale is made, ask the user for their email address to send an invoice.
Setup a simple invoice system with login and password, and host the invoice on your site. Send an email with the link, login, and password - assuming the user checks the email address on the same ip as when they made the sale you can match their user id and get the referral!
Or am I missing something....
We track all sales by source. Our brick and mortar business is a service. All sales are done either over the phone or in person. Nothing on the web.
We run campaigns separately and track them...but we don't really run web campaigns specifically.
A standard question over the last 20 years has been the source for finding out about us.
Web site is currently responsable for about 65% of sales. Referrals is the next largest source.
Its not exact but we put our faith in these numbers give or take 5%.
Over the last 6-8 years, the web has moved from 0% to a majority of our business.
Dave