Offline Conversion Tracking

Offline Conversion Tracking

2 I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted. I just don t know which half. A study from Jupiter Research shows that 43 percent of marketers don t or can t accurately measure the ROI from SEO. (Source: JupiterResearch, SEM Executive Sum- mary, 2007). This reflection by the early 20th century marketer John Wanamaker founder of Wanamaker s, the world s first department store and often considered the father of American advertising -- can easily be applied to 21st century web marketing. But despite the promise of today s web analytics, this unknown percentage still exists. The biggest mysteries in today s online marketplace relate to offline conversions (calls to your business or visits to your retail outlet). For example, a 2006 comscore study commissioned by Google found that 63 percent of website visitors completed their purchase offline while only 37 percent completed their purchase online. While this percentage has most likely narrowed over the past few years, it is still likely that more than half of your website visitors still convert offline. What are Offline Conversions? Companies around the world spend millions of dollars each day on website banner ads, search engine ads (Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter), email campaigns and traditional offline media. All of these methods are designed to drive traffic to their web sites. But generating huge numbers of unique website visitors isn t the end-game goal. The true goal of web site advertising is not merely to increase the number of eyeballs viewing website content, but to ultimately drive conversions. To most organizations conversions happen when a visitor completes a purchase, fills out a web form or contacts the organization as the first step in their purchase research. Yet in most instances, it s not a simple measurement/tracking task to gather accurate data. As reported by comscore a large percentage of website visitors will and do convert offline. Typical offline conversion points are: Visits to retail outlets Calls to place an order Calls to get more information before purchasing

3 Know which campaigns, keywords and marketing initiatives drive callers and whether those calls generate revenue offline or online. Until now with the advent of sophisticated call tracking solutions it has been virtually impossible to directly assign a specific conversion metric to your ad buy without implementing an burdoness task and often lacking measurement strategy. How can you measure offline conversions? Visits to Retail Outlets When it comes to people who view your website content, but then opt to make their purchases in person at a retail outlet, the mechanism for tracking offline conversions traditionally has been: Encourage the user to download and print a web coupon Place a unique identifier on the coupon to be used for reconciliation at a later date When the coupon is used, a reconciliation procedure must be in place to attribute the coupon and the value of the purchase back to the particular advertising event that brought them first to the web site. The obvious problems with this measurement technique are: It relies on the web site user to generate and print the coupon; The value of coupon has to be enticing enough to encourage its use; It is costly to track and reconcile coupon use; and Some people will never use the coupon or may lose it before the purchase. Once the data is gathered, it is then put through a series of algorithms (calculations) to extrapolate a picture of the true sales cycle. Despite the limitation of this solution, many organizations still invest time and resources into it for the simple reason that some data is better than no data.

4 Transactions Completed by Phone The first and most basic method to track phone calls is to establish a unique web telephone number, then to track the number of calls to this number and, finally, to manually record the value of the conversions. The challenge with this solution is that it relies on human beings to record and compile the data. The limitation of this technique is that the only data point for the conversion is the telephone number, which can be tracked. It lacks the ability to attribute a specific sale to the exact advertisement or marketing program. Call tracking enables you to calculate financial success for every form of advertising you pay for. A better alternative is to implement a call tracking solution. Call tracking software dynamically changes the phone numbers people view on your web page based on how they are directed to the site. By tracking and reporting on calls to the different telephone numbers including the sources that initiated the website visit and in some instances the value of a conversion, a greater part of the complete picture of website performance is illuminated. By integrating the call tracking data into your web analytics solution a more complete picture of the total user experience is achieved. This includes combining online conversions with offline (telephone) conversions to more clearly see the true value of specific media buys, as well as comparing the performance of specific ads to the exact keywords buys in Google Adwords(tm) or Microsoft Adcenter(tm). While no solution will capture and report results with 100 percent accuracy, the more data that you capture and report results in more informed decisions about your media buys. With data and knowledge in hand you can then proceed to optimize your media spend and to maximize your ROI.

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