It’s essential for marketers to assess their campaigns regularly and measure the return on investment (ROI). This enables them to see whether their existing strategy attracts their target group and which channels are most effective. The measurement of campaign performance isn’t limited to tracking customer behaviour, the number of likes and shares, but also looking at: 

• The number of clicks on an ad that navigates to the landing page.
• How many people add products to their basket, even if they haven’t paid.
• Sales of your products and services.

If you’re solely doing online marketing, you can easily measure the above metrics to help with data analysis and marketing attribution. Systems such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or the back-end system of social media platforms all help you collate and analyse valuable data. On the other hand, if you do multi-channel marketing, running a brick-and-mortar store along with an online one, how can you tell which channel drove your customers to purchase your products or services? Is it from your online ads? Offline attribution can give you the answers.

With that being said, there needs to be an offline conversion tracking technique in place, just like you would have for tracking online conversions. Before we dive into what offline conversion tracking exactly is, let’s talk about offline marketing in general first.

What is Offline Marketing?

Offline marketing refers to marketing that doesn’t require the use of the internet. The limitation of offline marketing is it may be quite costly if you want your information to reach a large number of people in a short amount of time. However, the advantage is that it has much higher credibility than online marketing since today’s online marketing can be done so quickly, which means people can easily post misleading ads. Therefore, although online marketing has become more popular these days, offline marketing – also known as traditional marketing – still plays a vital role for businesses.

Some examples of offline marketing include advertising via television, radio, billboards, print media, etc. Offline marketing is usually a one-way communication, so it isn’t easy to measure marketing success precisely, unlike online marketing, where you can use marketing tools to measure many different metrics.

Therefore, to measure the effectiveness of both online and offline marketing (a.k.a. multi-channel marketing measurement), marketers need to develop a way to track the results of their marketing campaigns and carry out offline conversion tracking.

What Is Offline Conversion Tracking?

Offline conversion tracking helps marketers discover if the customers who purchase from their store are the same ones who interacted with their brand via online channels, such as visiting the brand’s website, seeing their online ads, or even adding products to their basket. Both online and brick-and-mortar conversions are brought together to see how in-store purchases are affected by the conversion rate of a particular online campaign and what results were achieved according to the goals set (a.k.a. offline conversion measurement).

An example of this would be tracking the customers who made in-store purchases to see if they are the same ones who interacted with the brand’s online channels. An excellent way to do this is to gather customer information, such as emails, phone numbers, and payment options, and then match them with the user names on your online channels.

The Advantages of Offline Conversion Tracking

• Marketers can measure campaign success and see whether they achieved their goals.
• It allows marketers to devise better online and offline marketing strategies with data-driven insights.
• It optimises the brand’s ad campaigns.

Moreover, statistics from HubSpot around customer behaviours suggest:

• 81% of consumers usually search for information about brands or products before purchasing.
• 90% of consumers in the US find information via online channels before going to the physical store to see the products in person and make a purchase. This is known as ROPO: research online, purchase offline. This is particularly common for products people prefer to try before buying, such as clothes, shoes, accessories, etc. Only 10% then purchase on the website or through an application.

As you can see, if you track only your online marketing results, you only know the number of website visitors and how many of them added products to their basket. If they buy products from your physical store instead of purchasing on your website or through your application, you won’t be able to track the sales effectively. As a result, you need to also perform offline conversion tracking along with online (omnichannel tracking) to connect your online and offline customers, who can be the same person. This will allow you to get the most accurate conversion rate to analyse your marketing strategy.

Work with Syndatrace to Track your Offline Conversions

Of course, offline conversion tracking is less popular in Thailand today as businesses focus more on online conversion tracking. However, Syndatrace can make tracking offline conversions more convenient and quicker, so marketers don’t waste their time manually synchronising all their data. 

Syndatrace is a sales tracking system for marketing teams. It allows users to carry out in-store sales tracking in detail and provides effective ROI optimisation for businesses. The system works with all advertising platforms, including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Google, HubSpot, and Salesforce.

Syndatrace can help marketers to:

• Yield more profit from in-store sales with effective digital marketing campaigns.
• Allocate budget to digital marketing campaigns more effectively.
• Consider which campaigns make the most profit, so they can further develop those campaigns.
• Determine target groups and accurately retarget the audience based on the information from offline and online stores.

Syndatrace installs Sale Tools Offline, a sales tracking tool, into your POS system. You can gather your customers’ data, like phone numbers or emails, and input them into the software on your POS. After that, you have full access to all data on the sales tracking system and can instantly use the data on your advertising platforms.

In conclusion

It’s undeniable that one of the biggest challenges in marketing is identifying and managing overall sales from both online and offline funnels. It’s important to know whether your sales are worth the budget you’ve invested. Therefore, you need offline conversion tracking to gather the conversion rates of those who interact with your brand online and make a purchase in your physical stores. This information will allow your marketers to measure whether a specific campaign is effective or not and use the information to analyse and devise marketing plans that generate returns and sales for your brand.