Online-To-Offline Metrics Tools For Marketers And Brands

An important component of successful digital marketing is the ability to track ads to the offline point of sale, which is where the large majority of transactions actually occur. For auto dealerships, it’s important to be able to determine what triggers customers to inquire about a car on the dealer’s website or in person at a showroom. Although this information has proven to be difficult to determine in the past, there are new tools that are available to assist digital marketers in this quest.

The growing prevalence of smartphone usage combined with vast amounts of real-world data is helping marketers to gain visibility on the expansive landscape of online-to-offline transactions. Google’s Store Visits and Facebook’s Conversion Lift Measurement, as well as other efforts including the partnership between Twitter and DataLogix, seek to find the connections between digital marketing and offline sales. Marchex and Telmetrics’ call tracking and analytics tools are integrated into paid-search platforms to allow the tracking of offline conversions, which can assist marketers in optimizing their bidding to drive calls.

Location analytics company, Placed, has now announced a number of partnerships with major ad agencies, thereby illustrating the growing developments in offline tracking. Placed has developed a Nielsen-like, opt-in smartphone panel to measure or estimate the offline impact of online campaigns. A Placed mobile app tracks participating user movements in the real world and subsequently maps them back to specific mobile ad exposures to provide marketers with invaluable data about how well advertising initiatives are actually working.

PlaceIQ is another company that is involved in this realm. Through a partnership with Rentrak, it is able to connect smartphones, TV viewing and real-world behaviors to build audience profiles, offer targeting and gain new insights about the efficacy of different media channels. Advertisers or networks are able to learn about user behavior and tastes in a robust manner, for example, being able to determine what type of restaurant is preferred by those who watch a specific television program. This sophisticated level of information will empower marketers in making effective targeting decisions, such as advertising for products on programs that are most likely to be met with interest by those viewers. These types of insights are definitely new, and the marketing industry will be able to utilize this information significantly.

Users are offered incentives to allow their offline movements to be recorded in Placed’s smartphone panel, such as gift cards or other deals, and the company says that its real-world panel consists of approximately 500,000 mobile users. The data is collected and presented to the marketer or brand anonymously and in the aggregate, with no one being tracked without their explicit consent. With half a million mobile users already agreeing to be tracked, it appears that the incentives are working, and the likelihood is that the number of participating users will continue to increase over time.

These developments are certainly noteworthy for all marketers and brands, offering them valuable insights into how well their ad campaigns are driving real-world sales. It will be interesting to watch as more companies develop online-to-offline measurement tools. Brands’ expectations for this level of ROI visibility will continue to grow as the prevalence and sophistication of these analytical tools expands over the coming period.