For some brands, a conversion on the website is not a simple ‘click → buy → purchase’ model. Often there are more complexities, where an action on the site is simply a ‘lead’, and follow-up calls or interactions are more valuable. Take for example life insurance advertisers, where a typical customer journey consists of multiple devices and interactions, via web visits and phone calls; or telecommunication advertisers that require SIM card activation, which can also be fulfilled through a number of methods.
The examples above show that tag-based tracking is not a viable solution, as there are limitations to what can be achieved, and the full user journey is incomplete. This makes it difficult to put marketing budget at the top of the funnel without visibility into wider business objectives.
Offline conversions can be used across PPC, display and social, which use client-based customer relationship management (CRM) data as the single source of truth. A good use case for this is for clients that collect customer details on their websites and then upsell over the phone. With offline conversion tracking, you can see the true value of the customer across all touch points; e.g. website leads and phone sales. This data can then be imported to the respective channel (PPC, display or social) and media teams can optimise campaigns based on each CRM touch point.
All Response Media Viewpoint
Tag-based tracking will always have a discrepancy in comparison to CRM data, and for some clients that have complicated purchase funnels this means that the missing links can result in wrong decision making, which may have negative implications. As such, it is imperative to use the best tracking solutions for each client and in the above instance; offline conversion tracking has allowed ARM and its clients to measure complete end-to-end interactions, which has allowed clients to make smarter and better informed marketing decisions.
Through this approach, we look at data from our clients’ perspective with real value figures to the business and make optimisations using the data. As an example, for life insurance advertisers, we can see and optimise towards all metrics, even policy cancellations that might occur a few months later.
The ability to track and optimise towards CRM data is changing the way we measure impact for some of our clients.
