In this day and age, businesses are turning increasingly to online marketing as customer behaviour has shifted towards shopping via online platforms like social media sites, websites, e-commerce channels, etc. The main reason is that it’s quick and convenient to have items delivered to your home, whereas going out to buy from an offline store takes time. As a result, e-commerce is now taking over the entire market space.

With the increasing popularity of online marketing, marketers have discovered many marketing metric measurements for campaign tracking. They often use marketing tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Facebook Insight, etc. These tools provide data analysis and insights, so you don’t need to collect data manually. 

Now, have you noticed that offline marketing campaign measurement is barely spoken of? In fact, you may be wondering if offline marketing can be measured. The answer is yes, of course! It can be measured just like online campaign performance can be tracked. Today, we will guide you on how to track offline conversions.

Why Is Tracking Offline Conversions Difficult?

As you know, a marketing analytics tool like Google Analytics is essential for every business to track online performance. It helps provide various data points, including the number of website visitors, interactions between users and the website, the number of customers adding products to their cart, the number of orders, and many more. Yet, one thing Google Analytics can’t offer is insight into how to measure offline conversions.

While websites and social media have a back-end system that provides data-driven insights, selling in a brick-and-mortar store doesn’t automatically give you insight into how many customers visited your store in a day, what they purchased, and how much they spent. When there is no marketing tool to help, tracking offline conversions isn’t easy.

According to a study by Ruler Analytics, 100% of marketers promote their brands by advertising on television or radio, and 95% use print advertising. Moreover, 71% of marketers who use newspaper advertising experience in-store sales tracking issues, which is unsurprising as offline conversion tracking is still very new in Thailand.

So how do you know how effective your offline sales are? Let’s check out how to track offline conversions!

How to Track Offline Conversions

Although offline conversion tracking isn’t easy, it isn’t impossible. You can use the following four methods to track your offline marketing performance and see if your business achieves the return on investment (ROI) or ad spend (ROAS) you expected.

Create A Landing Page

One of the easiest ways to track conversions is to create a landing page to track the number of website visitors and how they interact with your site. Many marketers create a landing page to measure their online marketing campaign success. However, offline marketing results can also be measured by creating a landing page. If you want to separate your online and offline conversions, you can create two landing pages for easier and more accurate tracking. 

 Here are some tips for creating a landing page:

• Keep the URL short and simple to make it memorable and easy to type.
• Include the brand name in the URL. Avoid shortening the link to the point that your brand name won’t be included, as customers won’t be able to recognise your link, which may result in them not clicking on the URL.
• If you create a landing page to track your offline campaign performance, it needs to offer in-store pick-up only so that you can separate the page from the online campaigns and track your offline performance better. 

Use A Call-Tracking System

Another way to measure your offline conversions is to use a call-tracking system to store call data. Once customers contact you via the phone number shown on your ads, the call-tracking system will automatically record the call data. You can then track which ad the customers saw your contact number on and whether it was online or offline. 

To clearly separate online and offline channels, you’ll need to use different telephone numbers for each. By doing so, you can accurately track how effective your offline advertising is at driving sales. Then, you can use that data to manage your budget and make future marketing plans. Today, many businesses across various industries use a call-tracking system.

Use A Discount Code

Using a discount code is one of the most common ways to track offline conversions. You must create unique discount codes for online channels and your physical store so that you can track how each channel is performing. For example, you may have seen that a store offers a discount via its website, but it can only be used at its physical shop. This makes tracking offline conversions easier and is considered a form of online-to-offline marketing.

Work with Syndatrace

If you need help tracking offline conversions so that you can focus on other areas of your business, you need the services of Syndatrace. Syndatrace offers various tools to help you track your offline marketing performance, gather the data needed to analyse your campaigns, and devise effective future marketing plans that drive ROI.

Syndatrace’s process is convenient, fast, and simple:

• Syndatrace installs Sales Tools Offline, a sales tracking tool, into your POS system.
• You then collect your customers’ phone numbers or emails and input them into the software on the POS.
• Then, you have full access to all data on the sales tracking system and can use that data to inform future marketing campaigns.

Conclusion

Although e-commerce is gaining popularity, it’s undeniable that people still have to leave their houses every day to go to work, run errands, or socialise. Therefore, most people still regularly consume offline marketing materials; as a result, this form of marketing is still very effective. However, your time and effort could be in vain if you have no practical way to track offline conversions.

Now that you know how to track offline sales and conversions, you need to choose the system that best suits your business. If you’re still unsure, then contact Syndatrace. Syndatrace offers a comprehensive offline sales results tracking service, allowing you more time to focus on other parts of your business. Simply wait to receive the data from Syndatrace, then use it to analyse your marketing strategy and make adjustments that drive campaign performance.