What is offline attribution?

Online vs. offline attribution

Online marketing channels offer a bounty of sources and metrics to analyze. Not just click-throughs that show what customers engaged with but scroll depth and time spent on a webpage can also be measured to reveal where customers drop off. Heat-mapping, where a webpage is assessed for “warm” and “cool” areas of engagement, can also illuminate barriers to conversion – all of which help fine-tune a digital marketing asset such as a landing page.

There are many purpose-built tools that can manage all the data analysis and reporting of online conversions, such as Google Analytics.

Without the same commonplace, established platforms, offline marketing can leave teams to draw conclusions that aren’t firmly data-backed conclusions. If they see an uptick in footfall after launching an email campaign, for example, they may assume a connection but might not be able to prove it. They also lack direct insight into what about the email actually attracted and engaged people. Gaining this information can require a follow-up survey.

While online conversion measurement tends to be standardized, offline attribution can involve more customer and manual solutions such as:

• Cross-referencing event attendee lists against order details to spot the correlation
• Recording a Google click ID (GCLID) with the user data of a lead who submits a contact form or calls the business.

Offline conversion can refer to customers whose buyer journey hasn’t touched any online marketing channel, such as if they visited an event stand and then followed up with a call. It can also include online-to-offline conversions, where digital marketing activity influences an offline purchase at a physical site or over the phone. Both types bring the challenges of attributing the customer’s path to offline conversion.

Find out more about Attribution Modeling

Why is offline attribution important?

Offline attribution is essential so brands can understand (and measure) the efficacy of their offline marketing efforts and performance by channel.

Rather than speculating, brands gain transparency on how successful and useful a channel is for them. An event might not generate immediate conversions, for example, but might be effective in attracting traffic and raising brand awareness. A direct mail piece, conversely, might not lead to people engaging with long-form content on a website, but it might encourage conversions on a form or landing page.

With successful offline attribution, brands can then validate campaigns, rather than switching off or neglecting channels that drive value down the line. And with greater visibility over the offline journey, brands can identify and optimize underperforming touchpoints to enhance engagement.

Offline attribution can deepen brands’ understanding of customers and make it more sophisticated by developing a multi-touch attribution model. Since customers typically have several interactions with a brand before converting, marketers can flesh out the customer journey, instead of a more restrictive single-point attribution model that credits a purchase to either the first or last touch.

Likewise, offline attribution can open up ways of reaching new customers –or existing customers in new ways – without relying on online channels. By understanding offline performance, marketers don’t need to resort to a “spray and pray” approach to offline channels, as they’ll be equipped with data on which types of customers engaged with each one. With that, brands can then also personalize each offline channel – not only making the marketing asset more engaging and effective but helping build the customer relationship. This helps with crafting nurture campaigns by understanding how a customer found the brand or came to purchase.

If an online or offline campaign is designed to drive conversions through a discount or deal available at a specific site, brands can use offline attribution to uncover which channels and touchpoints led the customer to it. Reporting becomes more meaningful than simply how many of the offers were redeemed and also becomes more accurate by providing a clearer customer acquisition cost.

The result of offline attribution is better utilization of online and offline channels, so brands can expand their marketing presence and allocate spend to the right channel for their campaign objectives. This ultimately helps increase ROI and maximize budget reach, since events, trade shows, and direct mail can all be expensive.

How does offline Attribution work?

Offline attribution usually analyzes visit attribution, spend attribution, or a combination of the two.

Visit attribution looks at traffic data. If a campaign is designed to encourage customers to visit a site or store, and there’s a subsequent increase in activity, brands can deduce success. If the promotion is for an event or sale on a specific date or time period, that can be easier to attribute.

Spend attribution focuses on sales, which often is preferred because it shows bottom-line conversions. This metric can also be useful if the offline marketing involves a promotional code, since marketers can then see how many of the campaign-specific incentives were used.

Another method of offline marketing attribution credits a campaign with conversions that took place within a certain time period – an attribution window. In other words, if there’s a surge in sales calls while a direct mail campaign is live, marketers will attribute it to this activity. To take that further, marketers can then compare the same reporting period from a few months or a year before, to gauge the campaign’s impact.

Customized promo codes can also be used. These are unique to individual channels, so marketers can delineate sources of traffic. Some offline campaigns might even require the customer to present the print ad or email at the store or site to redeem the offer, further validating the attribution.

Challenges of offline attribution

Since, as discussed, offline attribution doesn’t rely on the established tools and methods used for online attribution, it’s naturally more complicated for brands to measure. Marketers can try to fill in their offline blindspots via post-sale surveys, but these depend on customers accurately recalling what drove them to purchase. In addition to the reliability and subjectivity of their response, there’s no guarantee every customer will submit an answer – even if brands try to incentivize it with a reward, which itself incurs further marketing spend.

While digital assets are more comparable in terms of user engagement – typically coming down to clicks and views – there’s more of a disparity in offline marketing, as users don’t engage with a direct mail or print ad in the same way they do an event stand, for example. This can make measurement and reporting less straightforward, as there’s more interpretive work in evaluating what metrics mean for campaign quality.

Attribution windows can exclude earlier relevant touchpoints. This can nudge marketers toward a single-touch attribution model by focusing on engagement closest to the point of conversion, rather than the full customer journey. It can also end up including sales that occurred coincidentally alongside a campaign that the customer may never have actually encountered, leading to inaccurate reporting. Another challenge marketers face is distinguishing between multiple offline campaigns that overlap within the same attribution window.

Brands may use a multi-touch model that distributes credit across all the touchpoints within the window. For example, the first and last touchpoints might receive the largest percentage, while the remainder is shared by the touchpoints in between. While this can seem more representative than a single-touch attribution model, it can still be arbitrary to a degree.

In short, offline attribution is far from an exact science.

How Acxiom can help

Like all marketing and customer analytics, accurate attribution needs clean and comprehensive customer behavior data. A partner like Acxiom can provide that – from assessing the gaps to fill in your existing data to unifying your online and offline data points.

Acxiom’s identity resolution solutions bring together a detailed variety of first-party customer data and supplementary privacy-compliant third-party data, across all channels and potential touchpoints. This allows you to recognize customers every time they connect with you and access a wealth of real-time and historic information about their needs and preferences.

You can recognize even more information about your customers and qualified leads across online and offline channels by using Acxiom’s Advanced Sales Match solution. It has the potential to improve matching by as much as 25% compared to traditional methods.

With a continually up-to-date picture of how your customers are interacting with your brand, you can then create truly relevant, personalized, in-the-moment experiences – online, offline, all the time.