We live in a cross-channel world. There are more media, channels, online moments of contact, and digital sources of information than ever before. Furthermore, the buying behavior has become way more complex.

When people want to buy something, they make a variety of decisions and undertake several actions before an actual purchase takes place. A lot of this takes place online. However, this doesn’t mean that we should just forget about the offline aspect.

People can inform themselves in their purchasing decision on trade shows, by reading magazines, through offline conversations with friends, etc. These are all offline.

This information can in turn lead to searching for more information, for instance on a corporate website. Here we’re online.
Or perhaps they happen to stumble upon a promotion for the product or service that they want to purchase. Online and/or offline: a printed promotional leaflet, a television ad, a coupon from a newspaper, an e-mail, a banner, a tweet, etc.

This may be followed by a purchase, or perhaps the buyer will gather even more information, compares prices online, or visits ten or so stores.

It’s impossible to exactly map all elements that an individual buyer takes into consideration, as well as all the steps taken during his “buying journey”. It’s always a mixture of online and offline, emotions and reason, decisions and doubts. And along with this, lots of moments of contact.

Measuring offline online: examples

The reality of communication and buying is integrated. Yet there are ways to transform some offline moments of contact into online data and measure them through web analytics. There are limitations, and it mostly happens with an individual campaign. But it is perfectly possible if you keep the limits in mind.

The big challenge is acquiring and combining the data available for a certain campaign around the various moments of contact. Another challenge is to map how the people in a certain campaign go from offline moments of contact to online moments of contact, and vice versa.

In order to be able to integrate the immediate impact of an offline campaign or touch point in your web analytics system, you can use an URL. You often see this in printed ads, advertising brochures, television ads, etc.

Sometimes companies redirect people to their homepage in those campaigns. However, it’s much better to create a unique URL, which recognizes the source of origin and is easy to remember for people. This URL can then be used in every moment of contact: in offline media, but also in e-mails, by your call center, etc. That way, you know how many people visited that special URL that is encrypted and tagged into your web analytics system.

This doesn’t so much say something about the impact of the entire campaign: for instance, someone who saw the campaign could have lost the URL and searched for your website on Google.

A second shortcoming is that you don’t know the medium through which consumers got to your “special” tracking link.
This is simply solved by creating an easy to remember URL for every potential touch point (your sales department, call center, printed ads, TV, even your reseller) that redirects to the landing page of your campaign, with which your web analytics system can differentiate the sources of origin using the right encryption.

Obviously you will miss a lot of the impact but at least you’ll be able to track the behavior of what people do that come from each and every offline campaign and have used the tracking URL.

There are other possibilities to measure offline interactions with online tools, like coupons.

Think about the best methods for your own campaign, and involve your own shops, resellers or distributors in this process as well, in case you work with those of course.