Measuring effectiveness and offline conversions

Oskar Dejneka

Mar 23, 20235 min read

Tracking online conversions is simple and effective, and we can easily attribute conversions to the appropriate advertising channels. But how do we connect our online activities with offline effects?

What are offline conversions?

Offline conversions, similar to online ones, are the performance of a potential customer of a specific action that is desirable from the company's point of view. The obvious difference is that offline conversions take place in the real world, whether in a stationary store or through another contact channel. The important difference here is that we have no idea what the user's previous path was, from what source he came to our store, as well as we don't know what he looked at before he converted. Because of this, we can't match his action to a specific channel, which can distort our overall picture of marketing effectiveness.

Conversions and offline ads simply cannot be measured by tags and are not measurable by popular analytics tools, so what actions can we take to track offline conversions? You will find out in this article.

Measuring offline conversions

Measuring offline conversions is not an activity that can be easily automated. Google offers several methods for measuring the offline value generated by online ads

Measuring in-store visits - using mapping technology and user location to measure in-store traffic after interacting with ads
Measuring offline intent through local actions - to be more precise, this is simply measuring actions such as clicking on a driving map, phone number extension, menu display and site visits
In-store sales measurement - offered only to qualifying advertisers

However, these are methods that are either not achievable for us, don't quite measure what we would like, or are not fully valid.

Instead, Meta offers to import customer data from a .csv file in order to create a set of offline events so that we can determine what portion of conversions the campaign potentially generated and what the estimated ROAS is. For this, however, we need to collect this data manually. So how do we do it?

Creating offline conversions

Advertisers allow us to create our own offline conversions. Depending on which medium we use this will be a slightly different process, but the main idea is the same, below we will focus on Google Ads.

By importing offline events, we are able to record all actions taken in the offline world after interacting with our ads. Google Ads offers 4 methods of importing offline conversions, these are:

Import directly into Google Ads - it allows us to import conversions tracked in any system and is the most universal solution
Google Ads Conversion Import for Salesforce® - a solution specifically designed to work with Salesforce CRM
Import using Zapier tool - this allows you to automatically import data into Google Ads from CRMs connected using Zapier
HubSpot's Google Ads event optimization tool - this allows you to synchronize data from your CRM with Google Ads

But how do we tell which offline conversion took place after an interaction with an ad? Each click on our site coming from ads is assigned a GCLID (Google Click ID) number, which we save along with all the customer data we have. If that customer makes an offline conversion at a later time, we record this in a spreadsheet according to the required template and send it back to Google Ads.

You can find more about creating offline conversions in Google Ads at this link. And here a handful of information regarding this procedure in Meta Ads, Twitter Ads and LinkedIn Ads.

Offline conversion measurement methods

Here you need to use some imagination. Measuring the effects of digital campaigns in the real world requires us to take an unconventional approach, but if it works - it's good. We'll start with the simplest method, viz.:

Ask

Sometimes it's enough to simply ask the customer how they found out about the products or services we offer, and note this fact along with the data in a table.

However, asking every customer can be quite tiresome, both for us and for our customers. In addition, it is often the case that customers themselves are not fully aware of their conversion path, they may not be aware of all their contacts with the brand or products, and they are often not very accurate, they may, for example, not distinguish between advertising on the Google search network and the organic result, which will not make our decision on how to deploy budgets for SEO or paid campaigns any easier.

Discount code

Another method, perhaps more effective, is to use dedicated discount codes. Here we try to link online campaigns that offer specific codes, then we can process this data in the CRM system, or even upload it as a data import to analytics tools, which will allow us to track the effectiveness of specific campaigns.

The downside of this method is the difficulty of saving or remembering a particular discount code, which can cause frustration for our customers. Too many discount codes can also negatively affect the effectiveness of our analysis and add unnecessary work for our employees. In addition, there are websites that collect discount codes from different companies, which may be the source of the discount code used, which will disrupt our data and analysis.

Phone calls

Tracking phone calls as offline conversions is possible with the help of tags or call extensions in Google Ads, but only to a certain extent. We are able to track clicks on a phone number and its copying using effectively set tags in Google Tag Manager. However, if the customer simply transcribes the number from the computer to the phone by hand - we will have no idea how they found out about us.

A half-solution may be to use a dedicated number that will only be available in ads (rather, in Meta Ads, Google offers good call tracking). Then we are sure that the only place from which the interested person could get it is through promotional activities. However, this is not an easy solution to implement for every company. However, it is worth tracking the contact methods listed above because most people, however, use a quick call or copy a phone number.

Loyalty programs

Żappka, Moja Biedronka, Klub Rossmann - surely these solutions are well known to you. However, did you know that in addition to serving benefits to customers, they also serve the purpose of accurate tracking of conversions by their creators? Using an app for payment at a physical point allows companies to combine data about the user with the ads he saw or interacted with and the conversions he made. So it's worth thinking about the possibilities of introducing a loyalty program based on user identification during offline transactions.

Click & Collect

While this is not a method of tracking offline conversions, it is worth offering this option on your website. It is a hybrid shopping method of placing an order online, but picking it up physically at a store or pick-up point. Thus, we can increase awareness of our physical location, traffic and improve the UX of the customer, who will not have to pay for shipping and will even pick up the product the same day.

Importing data into Google Analytics

After collecting conversion data using the methods described above and properly completing the spreadsheet according to the template, we are able to import it into Google Analytics, which will allow us to determine the quality and value of our offline conversions and compare them with online conversions. A detailed description of the implementation of this solution can be found here, while the requirements and the spreadsheet template can be found here.

Summary

Measuring the effectiveness of offline promotional activities is not impossible, as you can see, but you need to spend more time on it and meticulously record the data. In this article, I have focused on simple methods that do not require additional software, expert knowledge and additional expenses, so listed are actions that any small local business owner can take.

If you want to learn more about promoting offline stores, you can check out our Digital Start service.

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