Driving Visitation and Tracking Offline Conversions

In today’s world of digital advertising, whether you call it SEO, SEM or PPC; or measure by CPC, CPL or CPM, the goal is one and the same — tracking and conversion. While a variety of tools make measurement fairly mundane, how do businesses attribute conversions to the appropriate marketing source? Let’s explore two methods within Google’s AdWords Program.

Tracking offline conversions

Oftentimes, a click on an AdWords ad doesn’t lead directly to an online sale but it’s the beginning of a customer journey that will hopefully result in a sale or conversion. Whether it’s in-store or over the phone, we need to trace that sale back to its origin. To leverage this method, the prospect must have been driven to your website and submitted data (i.e. lead or subscription form). With the sale tied to its source, the sales team can track the offline activity against the original lead source via AdWords and show not only lead submissions, but how those leads resulted in actual sales/conversions.

Estimated Store Visits

With the relatively new AdWords ‘store visits’ tool, you can estimate the amount of in-store traffic that may have resulted from an ongoing AdWords program. Using an anonymous data set from mobile devices with location tracking enabled, marketers can estimate the amount of traffic that entered their stores and while this tool cannot tell you that X people clicked on your ad, which resulted in Y store visits and Z sales, it can provide greater accountability of your ad words program. Currently, this program is limited to larger businesses with multiple US store locations and a high number of ad clicks and store views such as Office Depot.

As the line between online and offline continues to blur and more people begin their search for products and services on mobile devices, offline conversion tracking will continue to mature. But getting started today will be a critical success factor for your AdWords program.