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Offline Conversion Tracking – The most important in a nutshell |
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Measurement of in-store visits: A topic that many marketers rack their brains over. Measuring the success of online campaigns is usually quite easy. But when it comes to offline conversions, Facebook, Instagram & Co. quickly reach their limits, because after all, there are no cameras hanging in our stores that match the face to the Facebook profile.
And so we can estimate the ROAS (return on advertising spend), but we almost never get really reliable figures. But how do you manage to measure the success of your online campaign on site at the PoS?
Online-to-offline marketing describes the online marketing of local products: Potential customers are to be addressed online and persuaded to buy locally in the store. However, there is a big problem: While online conversions can be measured quite easily, offline conversions are more difficult to capture. Especially if you want to draw conclusions about the success of marketing campaigns.
Offline conversions are difficult to measure, but it is not impossible. The following options are available to capture offline conversions in order to draw conclusions about the success of online campaigns:
Asking at the checkout where the customer found out about a deal or offer? – This method is extremely unpopular, but quite effective. Granted: you won’t get accurate numbers with this. And you won’t be able to draw comparisons between different campaigns, because customers will rarely be able to tell you exactly which ads they saw. But for starters, this method is good for getting a feel for whether your campaign is bearing fruit at all.
This option doesn’t exactly shine with innovation either – but it’s a cheap and quick way to implement. Regularly count how many people visit your store. Granted: Of course, this won’t work for larger grocery stores and other busy businesses. But it does for the shoe store around the corner. Now that you have determined the average number of visitors, you can run your campaign and determine through further observation whether your campaign is bringing you more visitors.
But be careful: think carefully about which days you are comparing. Your store is certainly not as busy on a Tuesday as it is on a Saturday – so you shouldn’t compare those two days. Just as a day in the middle of mid-summer cannot be compared to the run-up to Christmas. While observations may seem a bit more tedious at first, it’s a cost-effective and targeted way to test the effectiveness of a campaign. But again, it becomes difficult to draw conclusions about specific campaigns. Moreover, you won’t get exact numbers here either.
Couponing is probably the most accurate, but also the most complex way to check the effectiveness of your campaign. There are several methods when couponing: For example, it would be possible for the customer to download a coupon via the link in your ad, which they then only have to show in the store to get a discount of X€. Now record how many people show the coupon and you will have reliable numbers about the success of your campaign.
Another option would be to pay the discount only when the receipt is presented. Redirect your customers from your ad to a page where they can upload the receipt. Now you can refund them an amount, give them another coupon or promise special loyalty points – the sky’s the limit here.
Support stationary retail with online marketing measures: With Local Inventory Ads, you can advertise your stationary products in Google Search and on Google Shopping. When a user clicks on such an ad, he is directed to a seller’s page (the so-called Local Storefront). Here the user can find further information about this product. In addition, he can also access information about the store, such as opening hours, directions and also the availability of the item.
To be able to place Local Inventory Ads, you need a Google Merchant Center account and a Google Ads account. Google Merchant Center is where product and inventory data is managed. Google Ads is used to manage and control the campaigns.
The basis for Local Inventory Ads is correct product und inventory information. You transmit which products are listed and available in your local store to Google via data feeds. It is important that the data feed is always kept up to date.
The success of Local Inventory Ads can be measured using offline conversion tracking in Google Ads. Here, information about the success of the campaigns appears directly in the Google Ads account as soon as sufficient data is available.
Measure conversions in store: To measure the success of Local Inventory Ads in brick-and-mortar stores, Google pulls location data from users and records whether they interacted with or viewed an ad before visiting your store. For data protection reasons, however, data is only displayed here if enough store visit data has been received – and the data protection thresholds have been exceeded.
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The Google Store Visits method works in a similar way to the conversion tracking of the Local Inventory Ads: Google reads out which users have clicked on an ad and uses location data to check whether they will visit a corresponding store in the next 30 days. Google also offers a link to Google Ads here. This means that success can now also be measured directly at campaign or ad group level. Prerequisite for using Google Store Visits: A link between the Google Ads account and the Google My Business account.
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Anyone who runs a retail store definitely needs a Google My Business entry. Here, business owners can see how many users call for directions – or call your business via Google My Business. However, Google My Business is less suitable for tracking the success of individual campaigns.
Advantages | Disadvantages | |
Survey |
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Observation |
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Couponing |
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Local Inventory Ads |
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Google Store Visits |
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Google My Business |
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Do you run a local retail store and want to target potential customers around your location? With LocalUp, you can easily display ads in the direct environment of the POS. This increases the likelihood that users will physically visit your store. You can individualize the ads depending on the location – mention the correct name of the location in the ad or use real images.
As addressed above, measuring online campaigns that rely on in-store purchases is fundamentally more difficult than selling through an online store. But with a little extra work, you can measure the success of your next online in-store campaign. We wish you every success in doing so!
