Measuring impact of online advertising on offline sales
Online marketing’s best quality is that the measurement is very transparent. Sure, there are issues of attribution, first click, last click, etc., but the bottom line is that this medium is measurable. Unfortunately, because it is so measurable, when gray areas exist they are looked at with a sideways scowl.
One of our services–local map listings–is to assist companies with brick-and-mortar locations in gaining exposure across local properties (Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Insiderpages, etc.). Research indicates that users searching for local products/services are most likely to contact/visit offline, hence a ROI measurement issue.
Basically, the best indicators at this time are anecdotal and couponing. And both have serious limitations.
Google’s retail blog yesterday produced some interesting research based on a retailer that has no online e-commerce possibilities, eliminating some of the confounding variables in this measurement.
The research is far from perfect but it shows what we believe. Online advertising will have a direct and positive impact on offline sales. If anyone has any other ideas on measuring this impact, I’d love to hear them.
~porter32
on March 30th, 2009 at 11:49 am
I believe that at this particular moment online advertising, in the proper way, is one of the most important ways of attracting new and repeat customers as the regular consumer of any particular product uses the internet as their first resource for searching a want or a need. I think the real question would be to figure out not only the exact impact of online advertising to offline sales but how many of those are repeat customers to try and minimize the direct/strong push for promotion in a certain market decreasing money spent on advertising and attributed to other factors like product development…finding the perfect level to reach a so called “economies of scale”