Three Ways Marketers Can Tackle Offline Attribution

Due to the importance of marketing attribution, there’s been an explosion of technology and models aimed to help marketers follow customers along the path-to-sale across channels and devices. But attribution is anything but easy. Pure online-to-online attribution is tricky enough, and things get more complex with offline attribution (i.e. bridging online marketing to offline sales and vice versa). Clearcode CEO, Maciej ZawadziÅ„ski shares three ways for marketers to begin tackling offline attribution

All modern marketers know they must pay attention to attribution in today’s data-driven world, yet for many, how to perform proper attribution remains nebulous. Experts have long debated the attribution topic, with some questioning if accurate attribution is possible at allOpens a new window .

Even if marketing attribution isn’t an exact science, it’s important for two reasons. First, it allows marketers to better understand their best-performing marketing channels and campaigns. This information allows them to shift budgets and focus on high ROI marketing activities – both on and offline.

Secondly, attribution is important in performance-based marketing where advertisers pay partners and affiliates to drive sales. Marketers that pay commissions on a performance basis need to understand to whom they should attribute a sale and subsequently reward.

Due to its importance, there’s been an explosion of attribution technology and models aimed to help marketers follow customers along the path-to-sale across channels and devices. There have been improvements in methods, for example in performance-based models, marketers increasingly favor value attributionOpens a new window over last-click-wins.

But attribution is anything but easy. Pure online-to-online attribution is tricky enough, and things get more complex with offline attribution (i.e. bridging online marketing to offline sales and vice versa). Offline attribution is critical, as according to Forrester Research, by 2021, the web will influence 46% of offline salesOpens a new window .

Here are three ways for marketers to begin tackling offline attribution.

Attribution Windows

An attribution window is simply a period of time that ends with a conversion. This could be one week, two weeks, a month or more. A campaign gets credit for conversions that occur within that set time period. Marketers can use attribution windows to tie offline campaigns to the timing of online customer activity. For offline marketing campaigns with a specific airing time (i.e. TV, radio), marketers can examine the difference in online traffic and conversions compared to a similar previous time period.

For online campaigns that drive offline traffic, marketers can examine the physical traffic to the point of sale (i.e. brick-and-mortar store) during a set time period after running an online ad for a specific region. Another idea is for marketers to track the number of visitors who used the driving directions or store-locator feature on their company’s website.

Attribution windows aren’t perfect and come with many questions around time limits, identifying customers that made a purchase but weren’t exposed to the specific campaign, and understanding if there’s an overlap in campaigns that are both driving customer action. One way to address this is through surveys (both online and at the point-of-sale) to get information from customers about where they saw your ad or promotion.

Geo-targeting

The ubiquitous use of mobile devices by consumers has opened up massive opportunities for marketing attribution via geo-targeting. For online to offline attribution, marketers can push an ad or promotion to mobile users through a mobile app or email and then can track to see what customers came to the store by monitoring mobile traffic in one of two ways:

• Geo-fencing (using phone’s latitude and longitude) or listening to RTB (Real-time-bidding) activity: Some marketers attempt to pinpoint attribution via data from the ad exchanges versus the actual mobile application.  This is a common approach but is also criticized for its lack of accuracy (can be off by hundreds of meters).
• Beacons: More brands are starting to adopt beacon technology as a way to improve offline attribution due to location accuracy (down to meters) and the fact that an application doesn’t need to be open on a customer’s phone for them to work.

Beacons look to have a promising future and the beacon installed base and according to industry research is projected to consist of 4.5 million active beacons overall by year end 2018, with 3.5 million of these in use by retailers.

Advertising channels such as social media are also making improvements to help businesses in their push to better understand how digital advertising impacts in-store traffic and sales. Facebook for example recently added new features to its “Local Awareness” ad product to help shoppers find the nearest store and businesses track the traffic and sales generated from these ads. Pinterest is also working hard to help businesses connect promoted pin ads to offline sales.

For offline to online, marketers can look at outdoor campaigns in specific regions and collect the delivery address or postal code from online store purchases and compare to differences before the offline campaign started.

Paid Search

The search functions on Google and Google Maps provide businesses a powerful way to get in front of customers searching for local stores, and these searches are a great signal of customer intent. Prior to 2015, information that popped up from a search included only products that could be purchased online. Google’s local search ads now allow businesses to drive customers to physical stores both in Maps and through general searches with queries for local information (e.g. “coffee shops near Penn Station). Using location data, marketers can track if a store visit and purchase resulted from a click on a paid search ad. This will become more interesting as consumers begin to use voice search to find local businesses in addition to actually typing searches into desktop or mobile devices.

The Future

As technology continues to improve, marketers will be able to better bridge online and offline activity. There are certainly many challenges such as privacy. For instance, a reliable way for marketers to tie an individual customer to a specific online activity based on an ad are through payment solutions used at the point of sale (e.g. Square).

These payment solutions use email addresses and phone numbers to identify the customer and using this info, it’s possible to attribute things like advertising to eventual credit card purchases. Again, there are privacy concerns to address, but attribution techniques like this are technically feasible and could happen in the future. Card-linked offers (coupons loaded directly onto a customer’s credit card) provide a great way to perform offline attribution.

There are a lot of methods that promise to be the holy grail for offline attribution, but the reality is there’s yet to be a foolproof way to capture the link between all online and offline activity. For most businesses, the best attribution strategy is probably a combination of techniques all that leverage technology and data efficiently and within the boundaries of customer privacy.