How do marketers know if their digital campaigns are creating conversions and if customers are going offline when making purchases? This has long been the situation that caused sales teams and marketers to silo their efforts and track hard conversions and soft conversions separately, despite working towards the same goal.
Depending on your business’s goals, conversion points can look very different for consumers, but that doesn’t mean digital campaigns don’t affect offline conversions. If we know a customer interacted with the campaign online, we can start to determine how that influenced their next steps with offline attribution.
Marketers need to have proof that advertising campaigns result in sales. For e-commerce advertisers, attribution is a more straightforward process. Tracking pixels monitor consumer behavior on websites and can tell which customers saw your ads before purchasing. For advertisers in verticals where purchases predominantly occur offline, online to offline attribution is more complicated.
Offline Attribution
the analytical practice of determining which digital marketing tactics, such as channels, campaigns, or creative, precede and contribute to offline business sales or conversions
How does offline attribution work?
As a marketer, how do you know which of your efforts really convinced the customer to buy?
Offline attribution connects digital and traditional marketing efforts to offline outcomes. By breaking down the silos and viewing every step of the customer journey, marketers can start to quantify an ROI for marketing campaigns beyond the highly trackable online world.
Offline attribution models require the ability to compile and connect massive amounts of data from several different sources. By utilizing many pieces of technology, offline attribution platforms tie together complex online attribution models with trackable offline events. These platforms can achieve high levels of visibility by uniting offline data sets – like CRMs or IP addresses – to apply the same identifiers used to track online conversions to the eventual offline purchases that occur. This marriage of data is a key to figure out which of your online conversions eventually led to revenue for the business.
Offline attribution is the metric that aims to measure the effect of data-driven marketing campaigns across any channel (digital-online, mobile, DOOH, connected TV) in driving foot traffic to offline brick and mortar locations.
Why does offline attribution matter?
Not all leads eventually purchase, and even for the ones that do, there could be several months between the time the lead is captured and when they actually decide to buy. With an offline attribution model, both marketing and sales teams look at the same picture of the customer, from new website visitors to known leads to paying customers. Offline attribution allows marketers to view a customer’s journey at every touchpoint from start to finish.
