Methods of Tracking Offline Conversions
The struggle we have as online marketers is to find ways to measure the effectiveness of advertising, including those elusive offline conversions. Offline conversions are simply sales that start online but are completed offline—either by way of a phone call or a visit to a physical store. The challenge is tracking that customer behavior after customers leave their computers.
Here are a few methods used to track conversions offline. I’ve grouped these methods in increasing order of sophistication and cost.
1. Simple Methods for Offline Conversion Tracking
The easiest technique is to make an assumption based on a change in sales. If sales go up after an online advertising campaign, then you can assume it’s due to that campaign. This method isn’t so much of a method as a practice.
Another example of a simple method is using anecdotal data to gather statistics. Here you might ask your salesman or call center to inquire of customers how they learned about your products. You can also use in-store surveys to ask customers how they located your products.
The obvious problem with these simple techniques is that, although they are easy to implement, they are VERY imprecise.
2. Intermediate Methods of Offline Tracking
Most small businesses lack the infrastructure or resources to spend on higher-end methods. So one intermediate method for tracking offline sales is by gathering some data in a trial program and then extrapolating it to future sales or a larger campaign.
For example, we ran a trial PPC campaign for a client who had businesses in many locations across the country and wanted offline information but didn’t have the resources to continually track offline conversions. We built a short-term campaign targeting a mini-site with a custom 800 number as well as an online reservation form.
At the end of the pilot test, we calculated an online to offline conversion ratio that we were then able to apply to a much wider PPC campaign targeting multiple sites. This allowed us to have a real-world estimate of the online to offline conversion ratio even though the client could not continue to dedicate the resources to track the offline conversions directly over the long term.
Other options that give offline accountability include the tried-and-true coupon code or special offer codes. This method relies on the customer entering a special identifier that both gives them a discount and also allows you to track where the customer came from.
A more subtle approach is to configure your site to generate a special price based on the source of the traffic. While this does not require giving a discount (other than a few cents off to achieve the special price), it does cause possible confusion for both the customer and your sales staff due to the variability of the pricing.
3. Advanced Offline Conversion Tracking Techniques
Now let’s look at some higher end techniques.
Customer tagging is one method used especially by companies who have loyalty or frequent buyer programs. To implement customer tagging, the customer needs to be uniquely identified on the site, usually through a log in, a customer ID or an order ID. The customer starts the purchasing process online, then comes in or calls the store to complete the transaction. The ID can then be used to tie the offline sale to the online behavior.
Unique phone numbers for referrers. Another advanced method for tracking offline conversions is the use of persistent unique phone numbers based on referrers.
This approach can be used to track offline conversions from a variety of lead generation sources. Javascript on the landing pages identifies the source of the referral and displays a unique phone number. The visitor is also tagged with a cookie, so as that visitor explores the site the same unique phone number is consistently displayed. Even if the customer bookmarks the site and returns at a later date he will view the same telephone number.
Pay-per-call. Commercial pay per call services can work with your paid advertising campaigns to track conversion performance across different search engines. These vary in sophistication, but basically they work by generating a phone number for the visitor based on the source of the traffic. In addition, they track the call performance using their proprietary systems, so you can get call length, conversion, and other information without the need to dedicate a phone number to that particular campaign.
4. Graduate level offline conversion tracking
One of the advantages of pay-per-click advertising from an online conversion perspective is the ability to track a conversion back to the specific keyword phrase that brought the visitor to the site. If you know a specific keyword brings in converting visitors, you may allocate more of your budget for that keyword.
Call tracking of keyword-driven traffic. Sophisticated call tracking tools provide the ability to track offline conversions with a similar high level of detail as online analytics. Obviously, asking a customer what search phrase they used to find your site online won’t likely be effective. An automated service is the best approach if you need that fine-grain concentration of detail when tracking conversions.
This is a level of service that would be difficult to achieve by a site owner on his own. Tracking offline conversions down to the keyword level requires the dedication of perhaps hundreds of toll-free numbers, and would then still require a lot of back-end integration with your phone system to capture all the conversion information.
Source: Offline Conversion Tracking: The Missing Metric by Christine Churchill, Search Engine Land
