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04.17.08 How To Track Offline Sales To Your Site  By
Mike Moran When I speak at conferences and other events, I frequently discuss how businesses without shopping carts can track their offline sales back to their Web sites. Only by doing so can these businesses truly know how much their Web site is worth, and by extension know how much to invest. Similarly, they can't know whether any individual change to their Web sites was an improvement or a regression without a way of keeping score. Most Web sites don't sell online, so if you've been struggling with how to tie offline sales back to the Web experiences that spawned them, read on. In my talks, I help people to see that tying offline sales back to the Web is not a new problem-it's one marketers have struggled with for years. When you read an ad in a magazine that says to call this number and "Ask for Alice," do you really think there's an Alice? No, "Alice" is just the code name that tells the marketer which ad prompted the call, so that credit can be allocated and the best-performing ad venues can be repeated. Likewise, the Web gives you similar opportunities. Auto manufacturers let you build your own car, choosing the exterior color, the leather interior, the GPS system, whatever you want right up to the point where you blow your budget. Then, you can print it out and bring it to your local dealer and say, "How much for one of these?" The car dealer marks down that you brought in the printout so that if you end up buying a car, the Web channel gets credit. The key to tying offline sales to online activity is to find something people are willing to do. Why do customers willingly configure their cars online and bring printouts to the dealer? Because most people will do almost anything to spend less time interacting with a car salesman. If your customers actually like your sales people, you might have to offer them a discount coupon they can print from the Web or some other enticement.
Obviously, if your customers are willing to fill out contact forms with a phone number or an e-mail address, you can tie them to the Web. But many companies struggle when the customer decides to pick up the phone. IBM sprinkles "Call me" buttons throughout the site, where pressing the button alerts the IBM phone specialist for that product to call the customer back, thus tying any resulting sale back to the Web. But you might guess that is a very high-tech and expensive approach that is beyond the means of most marketing budgets. What is a more low-tech approach? I've often remarked that an easy way to tie offline sales back to the Web is to display a phone number on your Web site that appears nowhere else. That way, anyone who calls that number can be safely assumed to have come from your Web site. But reader David Brooks, President of SPS Group, challenged me to go further. He reminded me of schemes that go far deeper than a single phone number for your entire Web site. As David put it, "While many people suggested a dedicated 800# for the purpose of tracking leads, a dedicated phone number allows you (at best) to track down to the channel level, not campaign or keyword." Continue reading this article.
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