Digital marketers have always had one drum they loudly beat in front of traditional advertising channels: "We can measure what we do better than you." Now, we weren't embellishing the truth or anything — we can measure digital advertising performance at a much more granular level than we can traditional advertising. But it's not perfect. Multichannel digital marketing teams always have one niggling thought that keeps them awake at night: online activity is driving in-store sales and we can't claim any credit for it.
Offline sales are happening. Sure enough, we're seeing online shopping become more and more popular, but even so, you’ll never see 100% of your sales being made online if you're a multichannel retailer. Whether it’s a dress that needs to be tried on or a TV you want to measure up before you buy, in-store purchases are going nowhere. But it's more important than ever to make sure you don't underestimate the impact your online advertising has on offline sales.
ROPO: Research Online Purchase Offline has plagued multichannel retailers for years. This is when awareness and hot leads are generated online, but the customers convert in-store.
There is one other problem hampering many multichannel businesses: viewing their online store as "just another store" and, in many cases, the store managers themselves considering the website to be a competitor.
In this article, I'll show you how we've improvised to create a ROPO report for DID Electrical, an Irish electrical and home appliance multichannel retailer, to provide greater insight into their customers' multichannel journey and how this affected their business.
What is ROPO reporting?
Offline conversions are a massive blind spot for digital marketers. It's the same as someone else taking credit for your work: your online ads are definitely influencing shoppers who complete their purchase offline, but we can't prove it. Or at least we couldn't prove it — until now.
ROPO reporting (Research Online Purchase Offline) allows multichannel retailers to see what volume of in-store sales have been influenced by online ads. Facebook has trail-blazed in this area of reporting, leaving Google in their wake and scrambling to keep up. I know this well, because I work on Wolfgang's PPC team and gaze enviously at the ROPO reporting abilities of our social team. Working with DID, we created a robust way to measure the offline value of both PPC and SEO activity online.
To create a ROPO report, multichannel retailers must have a digital touch point in-store. This isn't as complicated as it sounds and can be something like an e-receipt or warranty system where you email customers. This gives you the customer data that you'll need to match offline conversions with your online advertising activity.
As I mentioned earlier, Facebook makes this nice and simple. You take the data gathered in-store, upload it to Facebook, and they will match as many people as possible. Our social team is generally seeing a 50% match rate between the data gathered in-store and Facebook users who've seen our ads. You can watch two of my colleagues, Alan and Roisin, discussing social ROPO reporting in an episode of our new video series, Wolfgang Bites:
Clearly, ROPO reporting is potentially very powerful for social media marketers, but Google doesn't yet provide a way for me to simply upload offline conversion data and match it against people who've seen my ads (though they have said that this is coming for Google AdWords). Wouldn't this be a really boring article for people working in SEO and PPC if I just ended things there?
Google ROPO reporting
DID Electrical were a perfect business to develop a ROPO report for. Founded back in 1968 (happy 50th birthday guys!), a year before tech was advanced enough to put man on the moon, DID strives to "understand the needs of each and every one of their customers." DID have an innovative approach to multichannel retail, which is great for ROPO reporting because they're already offering e-receipts to customers purchasing goods for over €100. Better still, the email delivering the e-receipts also has a link to a dedicated competition. This sits on a hidden landing page, so the only visitors to this page are customers receiving e-receipts.
They were nearly set for ROPO reporting, but there was just one extra step needed. In Google Analytics, we set the unique competition landing page URL as a goal, allowing us to reverse-engineer customer journeys and uncover the extent of Google PPC and SEO's influence over in-store sales. Before I unveil the results, a few caveats.
The ROPO under-report
Despite our best efforts to track offline conversions, I can't say ROPO reporting reflects 100% of all in-store sales influenced by digital ads. In the past, we've been open about the difficulties in tracking both offline conversions and cross-device conversions. For example, when running a social ROPO report, customers might give a different email in-store from the one attached to their Facebook account. For an SEO or PPC ROPO report, the customer might click a search ad on a work computer but the open their e-receipt on their smartphone. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the beast, ROPO reporting just isn't 100% accurate, but it does give an incredible indication of online's influence over offline sales.
I expect to see improved reporting coming down the line from Google, and they're definitely working on a ROPO reporting solution like Facebook's upload system. While our approach to ROPO reporting does shine a light on the offline conversion blind spot, it's entirely likely that digital advertising's influence goes far beyond these (still mightily impressive) results.
It’s also important to note that this method isn’t intended to give an exact figure for every ROPO sale, but instead gives us an excellent idea of the proportion of offline sales impacted by our online activities. By applying these proportions to overall business figures, we can work out a robust estimate for metrics like offline ROI.
Results from ROPO reporting
I'm going to divide the results of this ROPO reporting innovation into three sections:
- PPC Results
- SEO Results
- Business Results
1. PPC results of ROPO reporting
First of all, we found 47% of offline customers had visited the DID Electrical website prior to visiting the store and making a purchase. Alone, this was an incredible insight into consumer behavior to be able to offer the team at DID. We went even further and determined that 1 in 8 measurable offline sales were influenced by an AdWords click.
2. SEO results of ROPO reporting
This method of ROPO reporting also means we can check the value of an organic click-through using the same reverse-engineering we used for PPC clicks. Based on the same data set, we discovered 1 in 5 purchases made in-store were made by customers who visited the DID site through an organic click prior to visiting the store.
3. Business results of ROPO reporting
ROPO reporting proved to be a great solution to DID's needs in providing clarity around the position of their website in the multichannel experience. With at least 47% of offline shoppers visiting the site before purchasing, 1 in 8 of them being influenced by AdWords and 1 in 5 by SEO, DID could now show the impact online was having over in-store sales. Internally, the website was no longer being viewed as just another store — now it's viewed as the hub linking everything together for an improved customer experience.
Following the deeper understanding into multichannel retail offered by ROPO reporting, DID was also able to augment their budget allocations between digital and traditional channels more efficiently. These insights have enabled them to justify moving more of their marketing budget online. Digital will make up 50% more of their overall marketing budget in 2018!
Getting started with ROPO reporting
If you're a digital marketer within a multichannel retailer and you want to get started with ROPO reporting, the key factor is your in-store digital touchpoint. This is the bridge between your online advertising and offline conversion data. If you're not offering e-receipts already, now is the time to start considering them as they played a critical role in DID’s ROPO strategy.
ROPO Cheat Guide (or quick reference)
If you're a multichannel retailer and this all sounds tantalizing, here’s the customer journey which ROPO measures:
- Customer researches online using your website
- Customer makes purchase in your brick-and-mortar store
- Customer agrees to receive an e-receipt or warranty delivered to their email address
- Customer clicks a competition link in the communication they receive
- This action is captured in your Google Analytics as a custom goal completion
- You can now calculate ROAS (Return On Advertising Spending)
The two critical steps here are the digital touchpoint in your physical stores and the incentive for the customer’s post-conversion communication click. Once you have this touchpoint and interaction, measuring Facebook's social ROPO is a simple file upload and using what I’ve shown you above, you’ll be able to measure the ROPO impact of PPC and SEO too.
If you do have any questions, pop them into the comments below. I have some questions too and it would be great to hear what you all think:
- If you're a multichannel retailer, are you in a position to start ROPO reporting?
- Does your company view your website as a hub for all stores or just another store (or even a competitor to the physical stores)?
- Have you seen a shift in marketing spend towards digital?
Thank you very much. I did not know this kind of report. But crossing the data in this way has made me see clearly how I can adapt it to my business.
Personally, I really liked this phrase:
"With at least 47% of offline shoppers visiting the site before purchasing, 1 in 8 of them being influenced by AdWords and 1 in 5 by SEO."
I'll take this last.
Thank you very much!!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Those are great numbers indeed! I'm keeping them as a reference for future use. It's very hard to get these numbers, when we find them in great content like that we must use it as much as possible!
Glad I could help!
Hi Rob
Thanks for the interesting article! It's something I have been dealing with and explaining to CEOs and CMOs in the last few years.
I think Google has some interesting tools that actually shed a light on the ROPO effect.
1. Store Visits in AdWords
Based on clicks on your ads, GPS info on mobile devices etc. Google is measuring how many people are coming to your store. Based on your offline Conversion Rate and AOV you can measure how much AdWords attributed to your offline revenue.
2. Store Sales Direct
If you collect email addresses in your POS, Google offers this feature that matches email addresses that made purchases with email addresses that clicked on an ad. It's a manual upload with encrypted email addresses. You can actually see the amount of purchases and revenue that your Adwords campaigns attributed to your offline revenue. My experience is that the in-store conversion rate and AOV of different campaigns are very different and that they're nearly always higher as the general offline conversion rate and AOV.
3. Store Sales Automated
Same as Store Sales Direct but everything automated with an API.
4. Store Visits in Google Analytics
I wrote this on my blog a while ago (just copy and paste the link https://www.optimizeroi.com/en/google-launches-store-visits-google-analytics-as-beta/). Google Analytics sometimes shows how many sessions of any channel lead to a store visit and what the session to store visit conversion rate is.
Data is extrapolated and as you mentioned earlier for your method, not 100% accurate but it definitely highlights the impact of your online activities to offline purchases.
Hope this helps in creating a complete ROPO report!
Thanks a million for the info! Google is definitely putting some focus on this area and the tools you mention above could get even stronger when Google Attribution comes out. Unfortunately not all of them are available all over the world (we can't use most of them in Ireland for example) so we had to think outside the box! This is one area where Facebook took a step ahead of Google so it's great to see Google starting to address this with these new tools.
Thanks a Lot for this information.
I was really curious about how the ROPO report had information about what percentage of people who saw the product online and purchased it offline. Thank You so much for sharing this information. It was really helpful :-)
No problem, really glad you found it useful!
Thanks for this very good content, I did not know much about this or rather nothing! It seems to me a very innovative way of approaching interesting topics about multichannel results.
Thanks Juan, glad you liked it!
Incredible post, Rob.
Sincerely I have seen many times in the situation of not knowing the influence of my texts in offline sales. I've also found myself in the situation of franchised stores competing with the web instead of paddling together to sell more.
Definitely, if a company draws a joint offline and online strategy, it can achieve much more than if they function as competition for each other.
Best Regards!
Thanks so much for the kind words!
Good one Rob!
Seems interesting that "1 out of 5 customers" made purchase offline after visiting website online. I seriously thought this many times but wasn't able to come up with any specific solution.
i wanna share one solution, specially for SEO/PPC, would appreciate your views on this -
Anybody who clicks on the URL whether from PPC or SEO, they should fill the form first after landing to the page (details like Name, Phone, Email) & when someone making purchase offline, they should share such details of e-receipt or new arrivals details, etc. This way, you can compare details from both channels.
I know there are less people who like sharing details to check out the products on the website but this process can give you accurate details+result, just depends how smartly you play.
Anyways, i'll try it out, thanks for sharing.
Thanks Shubham! I think it's a good suggestion and would give very accurate data. My concern would be around volume as there would likely be drop-off between people who click the link and actually enter their details. Depending on volume there may also be some more manual work involved which could take up more time, but the data you get should be extremely accurate so it could be worth it. I can see from your profile that you're based in India so you're not subject to GDPR which is coming into force in the EU in a few weeks but I'd need to verify that your suggestion would fall within the bounds of this before I would test it in Ireland. If you try it out I'd be very interested to hear how you get on!
Yes sure, let me test it on some of the clients and would see what results we get. I'll let you then, have a good one man !
Thanks Shubham, best of luck!
Rob
In my personal experience, normally when I go to a physical store and try on clothes, I later check the price online and sometimes I buy it there. So there is always cross information.
That's a great example of something Samuel Scott mentioned in a comment yesterday: where your offline store drives online sales! Harder to quantify but definitely something that has an impact.
HI! I've really loved this articles. It is very complicated and involves working hard to integrate the online and offline strategies but I think is a very important thing to do for any business.
Congratulations for the good job!
Thanks a million! Hope you found it useful.
With a well done strategy between online and offline, you can grow a lot and even if you do some actions such as picking up at a store or booking and payment at the nearest store. This avoids queuing or having to go looking for what you are looking for in the store instead of the web browser.
Absolutely Jonathan! The businesses who learn to integrate offline and online effectively will see huge gains as they wait for the competition to catch up.
Good Morning,
I love to read post like these because the truth that to measure some of the conversions is every day more difficult due to the omnichannel
You're absolutely right, it's a real challenge! Glad you found the post helpful.
Fantastic article Rob. Its always been hit and miss with ROPO reporting but having a digital touchpoint is crucial in gathering data. Would DID be the exception to the rule when it comes to requesting this level of data from you guys or can you see more and more of your clients seeing the benefit? Thanks again Rob
- Piece Ivory
Thanks a million Pierce! DID have been very forward thinking on this front and are leading the way for others. There's obviously a bit of an investment that needs to go into setting everything up which puts people off but they've found that investment to have paid off! As always with these things, early adopters see the biggest benefit so they've taken a big leap ahead of the competition. Going forward we want to get all of our clients thinking this way!
Great article! I was just wondering how GDPR is going to sabotage this kind of data collection in the EU though. You would have to put an opt in box to clients telling them you are using their data this way?
Thanks Neil! You're dead right, with GDPR looming we've had to do a lot of work to ensure that the data collection we're doing complies with the regulations. The method described above doesn't actually use any personal data for reporting purposes, it only uses anonymous Google Analytics data. The users consent to receiving an e-receipt when they give their email address at the point of sale and the only communication they receive on the back of that is an e-receipt. We've been careful to ensure we're not misusing anybody's data.
Great article! We have a client who has access to store visit data in Google AdWords, but the ROPO reporting in your article doesn't apply because their products are sold in major retail stores like Walmart and Target. There are no dedicated e-receipts for just their products. How can we develop a ROPO report for this client? I would like to hear more about how to create a path from digital marketing efforts to in-store purchases.
Thanks a million Derek! It's a really tricky one because your client is unlikely be able to get all of the data they need from the likes of Walmart. As Robnnl mentioned in a previous comment, Google are releasing a lot of tools around this at the moment but even they would be difficult to get what you need as your client would need to getting a lot of data from the retailers themselves. It's quite a different scenario to what we were doing with DID so presents different challenges. Do Walmart share much data with your client on in-store sales?
We get sales data but it's not from each retailer, it is a consolidated document from the client.
Hi Derek, it's hard to say for sure but it doesn't sound like you get the kind of info that you'd need to track offline sales from your online marketing efforts. Unfortunately you're at the mercy of the data you have so it might be a matter of working to improve the quality of the data you receive based on your relationship with the client. Sorry I can't be of more help for you on this, it's something I hadn't really thought much about until your comment yesterday and I've been driving myself crazy over the past 24 hours trying to think of a workaround!
Thanks for the insight into your process, Rob! We are a manufacturer with a pretty complex multichannel sales ecosystem and have been struggling with this problem for years. This becomes especially difficult when you sell through retailers rather than your own brick-and-mortar locations. Any thoughts for those of us who don't own the offline POS data or checkout process?
Hi Kelly, this is a really interesting one and similar to a question Derek Mabie asked a few minutes ago. It's definitely a different situation as the roles are essentially reversed from the case study I shared in that DID are retailer selling manufacturers' products. There are a couple of different factors that would come into play, the primary one being how much data do the retailers share with you? Obviously DID were in a strong position in that they own the data that we used whereas you'd be relying on data collected by others, which makes things a lot more difficult. We have also used geographic location data in AdWords to work out similar estimates but again this could be tricky when the products are sold by others and you don't own that data. I'm afraid I don't have experience of tracking these kinds of metrics for manufacturers but I'd love to hear some ideas if any of the Moz community have them!
I thought this might be the case. Thanks for the insight! I'm sure it's a problem a lot of us are continually looking to solve. Retailers up to this point have been hesitant to share their data with us so that adds a layer of complexity as well. Hopefully as we all start looking for more effective ways of doing this and proving ROI we'll start seeing more innovations coming from the platforms.
I think you're right and have no doubt that the ROPO effect is something businesses are going to focus on more and more over the coming years and the likes of Google will have to react to this further. If you manage to find a way that works for you I'd love to hear about it. I hadn't considered it from a manufacturer's point of view before you and Derek's comments and it's been driving me crazy over the last 24 hours! Definitely one of the next steps for ROPO reporting.
excellent post Rob !! I will have to take it into account in my projects.
Thanks a million! Glad you liked it.
Great article! With you every day we are more experts.
Thanks Carlos, glad you enjoyed it!
online activity is driving in-store sales and we can't claim any credit for it.
I'll add a corollary: Offline activity is driving online sales and you can't always claim credit for it.
Hi Samuel, this is definitely the case but is possibly even harder to quantify! It's obviously dependent on what offline activity is happening but I'd argue that a bricks-and-mortar store with no advertising is likely to have a smaller impact on your online sales than the reverse. I have no doubt that there is an impact though!
I don't work with any multichannel retailer's for SEO or AdWords but as a consumer, I have noticed here in Australia that a lot of retailer's are offering e-receipts. Despite this, very few seem to be enticing the customer to click back to a competition link/something similar to gain those important GA insights.
Very interesting food for thought though, great article Rob!
Thanks a million Casey! You're totally right, giving users a reason to click on the link was crucial in doing what we wanted to do and fair play to the guys in DID, they were on it straight away.
too many words, too few numbers for the best report man :) thanks thou!
You need words to explain the numbers!
This is great content, I had no idea this even existed! A whole new way to approach and measure multichannel results and contributtion.
Thanks for the kind words Edson, glad you liked it!
Do you think this would also work with consultative-sales type of products? For example, we have two clients that have high-tech products that require not only customer education, but also customization to client need. Would this process be too hard to execute in this scenario?
Hi Simon, the key to the method described is really around the ability to send the e-receipts and for it to work you'll need decent volume of data. If you have both of those things I think it should work for most kinds of products. It sounds like it's highly likely that customers would visit the site for the kind of products you mention so it could be worth trying out for sure.