Measuring Offline Conversion seemed to have an interesting title, so I attended the session.
Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing was up first. No one is arguing that online, influences offline marketing. The major question is, how much does online influence offline. She took us through two case studies. Case Study One: They sell goods online, and they wanted to understand where the sales came from. So they created a unique 800# for each search ad they made. They found 27% of the orders came over the phone and the remainder were online orders. So you are now able to track those offline orders and you can better understand the cost-per-conversion. Case Study Two: Childcare company. They tracked what a searcher did after they got to the site. They can now say, they sent X people to site, they went to a page, then made an assumption on how many people actually called (like 25%). Based on this assumption, this was the lowest cost-per-conversion methodology. Its not an exact science, its based on assumptions and guestimation.
Steve Schepke, VP of Marketing Services, Meandaur is going to highlight cases where he is managing offline conversions for his clients. Great Expectations is a dating service, the only way to sign up is in person at a center. How do they measure these leads? They built a custom lead tracking system that manages all online and offline leads. Next example is LA Weight Loss. This case is all about inbound calls, so it was a bit less sophisticated the Great Expectations.
Glenn Alsup, President, Viewmark was the only one that i have seen do a full Flash presentation at this SES conference, very fancy stuff. He works with a lot of companies that can not change the content on their pages nor tag pages. He takes this three axis graph (campaign, customers and content) and looks at it in a sales funnel way. Then they link up the offline information much like the others do.
I will throw my company a plug here, RustyBrick does this for several clients. Its truly not a huge deal, you really need to set up policies and procedures. When it comes down to figuring out who, what and where the sale came from, if you set up strict rules in your application and guidelines, you will be able to get the data.
