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.
What is Paid Search Advertising?
While there are other search engines, Google dominates the marketing world with Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords). And it makes sense since most users go to Google to, you know, Google something.
Paid search advertising (also known as sponsored ads, search marketing, search engine marketing, pay-per-click marketing, and cost-per-click marketing) is a technique that displays ads in search engine results pages (SERPs) whenever someone searches for relevant keywords. This way, the audience that sees your ad is perfectly matched for each result. Since paid search ads are based on the explicit needs of the users rather than on implicit information and behaviors, search ads target lower funnel audiences and can increase click and conversion rates.
Search ads are one of the most common forms of PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. While most search ads are only text, there’s a wide variety of sponsored search ads within maps, product listings, and featured snippets. All of these ad formats appear either at the top or on the side of your search results and are usually placed based on the ads’ keywords and how relevant they are to the results of a specific search query, the quality of ads, and the advertiser’s Ad Rank. Search ads can be very competitive, and the cost of these ads will vary depending on your competition. In many industries, you can expect to spend anywhere from 70 cents to five dollars per click (up to $90 for the most expensive keywords).
What is Offline Attribution?
At its core, offline attribution links online marketing activities—such as display ads, social media, and search campaigns—to offline actions, like in-store purchases, phone calls, or appointments. Marketers can get a comprehensive view of how their online campaigns drive real-world results by leveraging data from various sources, such as mobile location data, CRM systems, and point-of-sale (POS) systems.
Offline Attribution Defined:
The analytical practice of determining which digital marketing tactics, such as channels, campaigns, or creative, precede and contribute to offline business sales or conversions.
In this downloadable guide, you’ll learn the benefits of offline attribution, including bridging the gap between digital and physical, measuring in real-time with the highest-quality data, and stretching your investment.
Why Does Offline Attribution Matter?
As a marketer, how do you know which of your efforts really convinced the customer to buy? In digital marketing, it’s easy to track online actions like clicks and form submissions, but many businesses still rely on offline conversions, like purchases made in a physical store.
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, 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.
Here’s why offline attribution is critical:
- Holistic Customer Journey: Offline attribution provides a complete view of the customer journey, from digital touchpoints to in-store purchases. A McKinsey report underscores how modern marketing analytics must now integrate online and offline data to truly optimize for sales performance.
- Optimized Marketing Spend: By identifying which campaigns are driving offline actions, marketers can better allocate budgets. According to Marketing Week, understanding offline attribution helps avoid short-termism and under-investment, allowing for more effective, long-term marketing strategies.
- Better Decision-Making: Offline attribution provides valuable data for making informed decisions on where to invest in marketing. As noted by Ruler Analytics, aligning your digital marketing efforts with offline revenue outcomes allows for optimized campaign performance.
How Does Offline Attribution Work?
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 leveraging 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 key to determining which of your online conversions eventually led to revenue for the business.
Offline attribution is a 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.
Offline attribution works by capturing and integrating data from multiple sources. Here’s a breakdown of how it operates:
- Tracking Digital Activity: Campaign data from platforms like Google Ads or social media is collected, tracking user interactions such as impressions and clicks.
- Capturing Offline Data: Data from POS systems or mobile location tracking is gathered, allowing you to see if a customer who viewed an ad eventually visited your store or completed a purchase.
Attribution: Advanced attribution models tie online interactions to offline actions, helping you understand which specific ads led to conversions. As mentioned by Invoca, tools like call tracking software can bridge the gap between online leads and offline sales by recording phone conversations and analyzing data for improved attribution.
Benefits of Offline Attribution
- Understanding the Full Customer Journey: Offline attribution allows marketers to track customers from their first digital interaction to the final offline purchase, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the customer experience.
- More Effective Budgeting: Knowing which campaigns drive real-world results allows for better budget allocation. A report by McKinsey highlights how companies using advanced attribution models have gained up to 21% in sales after reallocating marketing spend based on customer journey insights.
- Increased ROI Measurement: With offline attribution, you can calculate the true ROI of your marketing campaigns by directly linking digital ad impressions to offline conversions rather than just relying on clicks or views.
- Cross-Channel Synergy: Understanding how different channels, from CTV to display ads, work together to drive offline conversions helps create more cohesive and effective marketing strategies.
Real-World Applications
Industries such as automotive, retail, and healthcare increasingly turn to offline attribution to understand how digital ads affect in-person visits. For instance, an automotive dealership could use offline attribution to track how a digital campaign increased showroom visits, while a retail store might monitor how many customers visited after interacting with a social media ad.
The Bottom Line
Offline attribution is essential for connecting the dots between your online efforts and real-world outcomes. By utilizing data from multiple touchpoints and sources, marketers can finally see the bigger picture and optimize their campaigns for real-world success. Incorporating tools like call tracking, CRM integration, and mobile location data helps marketers get a more accurate measure of campaign performance and make better investment decisions.
