The combination of the recession hitting and the emergence of online retail gave the high street a battering, in what many thought was a lost battle spelling the end of bricks and mortar retailing. Just a few years on, not only are physical stores thriving once more, but there has been a real shift to e-tailers moving into retail, having already built their brand and followers in the online sphere, in a practice coined as ‘clicks to bricks’.
In addition, many customers use the web to research their purchase before making it in store - so the lines between online and offline shopping have started to blur, with the digital experience in stores increasing for customers who can now access features such as touch-screens and interactive displays.
So whilst the boom in online retail revolutionised the way people shop for good, the high street is far from dead as bricks and mortar fights back – it may surprise many to know that three quarters of consumer spend is actually made offline. But with many marketing strategies geared towards online spend, particularly in the form of PPC, it’s important to ensure the ROI of these activities can be measured when it comes to offline spend.
In this new era of shopping, marketers have to think omni-channel. Whilst online advertising has boomed with the emergence of social media and Google paid search, providing some great avenues for marketers; tracking and measuring the effectiveness of these online channels has been a real challenge and up until now, a large proportion of customers have been falling off the grid in terms of marketing analytics when they walk away from their computer.
However, thankfully, great strides that have been made this year to effectively bridge the gap between online and offline, thereby allowing bricks and mortar retailers to finally compete with pure online outlets such as Amazon. This development has come in the form of online to offline tracking via Google Adwords, piloted and launched this year.
Thus far, tracking the success of an ad campaign by measuring impact on online sales from a particular campaign has been the only metric available. This method allows marketers to measure ROI and justify spend to brands and retailers, but misses the ‘black hole’ of offline sales. Google’s latest development links customer engagement with Google AdWords, with in-store transactional data, so marketers can now calculate the real ROI from marketing spend.
Moreover, using sophisticated CRM platforms, marketers can measure the impact of Adwords in terms of how much marketing spend it takes to get a customer into the store, what they buy in store and how much they are spending. This allows them to make comparisons across other channels, including social media and print advertising, to gain an accurate picture of what are their best performing channels.
It’s a welcomed move by marketers and search specialists who can now provide a new set of metrics to aid and justify decisions on campaign spend – allowing retailers to treat their offline businesses like their online one.
It makes absolute sense to be able to track sales resulting from online browsing, and include offline sales when comparing the ROI of advertising channels. As the lines between online and offline become ever closer, this kind of tracking will be the future as, already, the best retailers are starting to treat their offline businesses like their online ones.
By Ben Chesser, CEO of Coniq.
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