Sphinn - Offline Conversion Tracking: The Missing Metric

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Offline Conversion Tracking: The Missing Metric

Went Hot: October 19, 2007 - 7:53 am
Posted By: St0n3y 400 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Web Analytics

Christine Churchill recounts the struggle online marketers have in finding ways to measure the effectiveness of advertising, including those elusive offline conversions.

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from mpilatow 399 days ago #

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Great article. It's one of the things we are struggling with since all of our transactions end up completing offline. Many times, months after the original contact.

from tamar 399 days ago # - show/hide this comment

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#10000!

from Tyson 399 days ago #

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Another way to track offline conversions might be to generate a unique coupon code or visitor code that was displayed on the website. Something like "mention code #XXXXX when you call for additional savings!". These codes could be generated according to specific patterns based on visitor source. Then when the customer called and mentioned the code, you could record it and know based on the pattern what the source was. Certainly not fool proof, but it could help, right? (Of course you would have to give something of additional value.)

from LocalHound 399 days ago #

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One for my bookmarks... but as I recently posted I would not use an 800# if the campaign is locally targeted.

from RanOh 399 days ago #

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Another piece of the jigsaw can come from your logfiles & analytics. Resolving the IP addresses of visitors, or using a tool with a 3rd party IP database (e.g. Google Analytics, the report is called Network Location, for some reason) you can often resolve visiting IP addresses to familiar company names. Sure, there'll be a lot of ISP's in there, but there will also be some names you regonise - 'oh so that's where they found us'.

And for post-graduate offline conversion tracking, in Japan they often use Quick Response codes - http://www.searchat.co.uk/index.php/technology/a-solution-to-measuring-offline-conversions/

from earlpearl 397 days ago #

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That is an excellent article and description. As a local business operator and SEO, tracking is critical and off-line tracking is ever more critical. We have been tracking for over 20 years. Most inquiries were always by phone (2nd was walk in). Tracking for our service, was always accompanied by a sales chat, in which we always had to ask--"How did you find us?" Always.

Tracking over many years determined interesting trends, some of which hold true today. For years, prior to web visibility we saw relatively fewer contacts from YP but consistently higher conversion rates than from our more significant numbers of calls. From one old media source we found lots of contacts and calls and scarcely any conversions. We determined that media source went to potentially interested but unqualified customers and dropped it.

Tracking led us to refine our marketing efforts as we had a better understanding of what drove our customers.

Today the vast majority of customers find us on the web. Approximately, 60% of them contact us through the web and the remainder call us first. We always ask...."How did you find us". Our better sales people might squeeze in questions about web source (which SE or a link) and what kind of phrase did you use. Those findings tend to have reinforced the data we are picking up from Analytics tools.

A special phone number is INCREDIBLY effective for identifying the impact of special marketing efforts. For local businesses/those businesses that convert off line it is relatively inexpensive and easy technology and it is remarkably telling.

Tracking needs to be continuously done. Markets are always competitive and ever changing. ITs an amazing eyeopener.

Finally after all is said and done. We don't attribute exact numbers to our tracking but look at them in a broad scope. Over many years, many customers became aware of us through a multi-faceted manner, seeing us in various media, hearing about us through word of mouth, etc.

But it absolutely paints a picture of what works and doesn't and it leads to dramatic internal understanding on how to operate better.

Dave

from marketruler 395 days ago #

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There are simple online tools which provide the "5-letter unqiue code" that was discussed above; my company is one which provides something like this:

http://www.conversionruler.com/demo/cross.php

The primary problem that we see is companies have difficulties integrating the "cross channel tracking" (aka offline tracking) into their sales systems. It requires:

Training your sales and phone support teams to correctly retrieve the customer code from customers when they call
Modifying your order system to integrate the customer code into each individual order, and
Regularly exporting your data in a readable format to re-incorporate into your statistics to get "better ROI"

Most companies (and marketing departments) have difficulty integrating to this level; making it a generally difficult proposition to track offline.

However, we have many customers who still manage to do so...

from earlpearl 395 days ago #

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I can't emphasize the importance of offline tracking and the phone conversation with the potential customer. I just got off the phone with someone who found us on the web. I was able to ask the SE term she used (or long tail derivation) (It was one of our 4 most used industry terms.) I found out where she lived and offered her a discount, due to considerations via the phone conversation.

The site is often, the first step in generating the sale. The phone conversation is so critical to bringing in the customer. This was a wonderful article by Christine.

Dave