Blog / Tracking offline conversions

Digital marketing is a broad-spectrum discipline, covering everything from Paid Media to SEO efforts and CRO on websites, along with various content production offerings.

The hole in digital marketing’s formula is when it comes to tracking offline conversions. While there are myriad clever tools marketers can use to garner data and measure how our efforts perform, where the industry falls short is uncovering how we influence offline purchases.

The scenario goes like this: Whether you’re B2B or B2C, you flight a series of competing ads across Google and Facebook against your target audience. Someone looking to purchase your product or service is shown an ad, perhaps they click and land on your website, but they’re not ready to purchase just yet. They navigate away, but a few days later, they google your product again. This time, they pick up the phone to see if you have stock. Next time they are in the vicinity of your store, they decide to pop in and see the product for themselves or ask questions about your service in person. Eventually, after these touchpoints, they decide to make a purchase.

How can we attribute this kind of purchase to the original ad they saw online, and why should we?

First, the why…

Being able to accurately track offline conversions provides a digital marketing team with a more holistic and accurate view of their efforts.

It helps marketers determine which combination of effort work best to drive the most conversions, while also allowing them to evaluate whether targeting criteria for audiences is correct (i.e., to determine who is really buying your products at the end of the day).

By getting a better view of which combination of digital marketing efforts are working, marketers can also avoid switching off platforms or channels that work in favour of those that might get good impressions online, but not lead to any conversions in an offline environment.

Finally, and most critically, tracking offline conversions allows marketers to maximise spending and drive more significant return on investment in the long run, by putting budget behind efforts that actually make an impact, and being able to track the value of those real-life conversions.

By being able to track offline conversions, marketers can view the sales funnel in a more holistic fashion. For example, if we were only considering ads that directly lead to conversions, without dark data providing insight into what works and what doesn’t, we would switch off display media, which is top of the funnel when it comes to sales, but doesn’t necessarily reflect when it’s time to convert.

When implementing programmatic advertising for a client, although it targets top-of-the-funnel, we’ve seen a 43% increase in conversions, which once again highlights the importance of tracking offline conversion data.

Then the how…

So, it’s crucial to be able to track offline conversions for a complete marketing picture, but how can a marketer go about doing that?

The answer, as always, comes down to data.

Most major digital advertising platforms offer offline conversion tracking tools (Google, Bing, Microsoft, and Facebook). But to accurately track conversions, these tools require information gathered when a purchase is made, including email addresses, so that the tool can map the offline purchase back to an advert that was shown online initially.

Increasingly, the rise of QR codes, payment apps, and digital receipts is making it easier to gather this information to feed back into the relevant advertising platform and thus track offline conversions.

Another gap in this equation is that tracing offline conversions using any of the above tools is limited to their platform specifically, and thus doesn’t allow for tracing of the impact of techniques like organic social media efforts or SEO optimisation.

The good news is that even with Universal Analytics converting across to GA4, marketers can still track offline conversions with supplied data. Of course, there are also good old-fashioned techniques of customer surveys and in-store discussions, which can provide “dark data” on your customer’s buying journey.

The final word

While it does require some effort and input on the part of a business or marketing team, tracking offline conversions is a crucial piece of the digital marketing puzzle. It’s part of what separates a good marketing agency from a great one. Using the information provided by tracking offline conversions, teams can better strategize around which ads are making an impact, who their target audience truly is, and maximise budgets to best use for their clients.

Need help setting up PPC campaigns and offline conversion tracking? Talk to the team at Somebody Digital today.