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Don't Discount The Offline Conversion
March 21, 2006
From the I bet you weren't figuring this into your ROI file-- a new study by Google and ComScore Networks found that more than half of purchases related to consumer Internet searches occur offline:
The Internet giant teamed with the Reston, Va., research firm to examine consumer search and purchase behavior. It found that 25 percent of searchers for product information in several categories eventually made purchases. Of those, about 37 percent happened online, with the rest happening in stores.
The remarkable finding is even more remarkable in certain verticals:
Buyers who looked for information about video games, for example, visited stores for the product 93 percent of the time. That figure was above 80 percent for the electronics, music and toys categories.
We are still many such studies away from offline influence being fully and regularly credited to online, and not primarily due to the tracking leap required logistically; our great lurch forward from infancy to pubescence in the marketing mix has been propelled in fits and starts over our life span thus far by the sharpness of the direct marketing blade and the immediacy of real-time conversions taking flight at the very whirl. That is a big wheel indeed to unspin, and one that, you online marketers will know, can lose as many as it gains if it must necessarily grind completely to a halt in the proving.
All posts by John Lustina
posted by John Lustina at March 21, 2006 09:46 PM
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