Arthur Freydin’s Blog

Online marketing, gadgets, business, and thoughts.

Offline sales are a crucial element to many online business including transaction (ecommerce) based and lead generation. While web analytics solutions like Omniture, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics can provide in-depth analysis of online sales cycles, they cannot track sales that occur offline out of the box. Online retailers and other business models have struggled with the offline metrics for a long time, typically just estimated offline contribution to their online marketing efforts.

I’ve recently invited a account executive from Omniture to present their offering to myself and my team. While I am pretty familiar with their web analytics platform, there was one added feature that really peaked my interest. Omniture has came up with such a simple solution to track offline sales: reference numbers! It’s quite simple how it works. A reference number is attached to each page view that tracks these key metrics (and many others):

• source of traffic (google, yahoo, referring site, etc)
• keyword (organic or paid)
• ad creative
• etc

Once a potential client/customer calls in on the 1-800 number, they provide the reference number to the sales person. The sales person then inputs the number into whatever CRM solution they are using. That reference number is now retained through the entire sales process all the way to the very end.

Simple huh? So simple that the feature can be easily developed in-house with the help of a smart developer! All you need to do is assign unique identification numbers. Tracking unique keywords is easy: just append a key to your destination URLs within your campaign. The URL should look something like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/?kwid=12345678

The first 4 numbers (1234) within the ID can differentiate the search engines while the rest of the keys differentiate keyword and match type. Once a user lands on your site, the entire key (12345678) is visibly populated right under the phone number. If they use the 1-800 to call in for more information or to complete a sale, the sales representative asks them for the reference ID and inputs it into the CRM solution. Presto!

So a crazy thing happened to me the other day. I had invited my buddy Gary Caponegro to come in and do a demo for Omniture SiteCatalyst (a web analytics platform). I had 4 people attend: a marketing writer, 2 web designers, and a front-end developer. I thought that it would be great for them to hear someone else speak about web analytics other than me. Keep in mind that all 4 people know very little about online marketing and even less about web analytics.

I have used SiteCatalyst before so the presentation wasn’t as beneficial for me as I hoped as it would be for them. As I sat there during the presentation, I started gazing around the room at their expressions. Each and every one of them were intently paying attention at the slides and demo. This is a group of individuals that are highly skilled at their craft and are sitting in a presentation that barely has any content specifically geared towards them or their daily tasks.

Or so I thought. It suddenly dawned on me that web analytics (regardless of which product you use) are in fact as beneficial to them as it is to me as an analyst! In fact, web analytics plays a huge role in their daily activities; it validates their efforts! Web analytics measures every single piece of creative, every block of copy, and every line of code that they create. They had no idea that their work can be tracked with that infinite amount of detail and accountability.

I later met with the attendees and asked them what they thought about the presentation. The response was unanimous: they loved it and thought that it was very beneficial. The marketing writer in particular actually thanked me for dragging her away from her pile of work. She was truly interested in what Gary was presenting. Her words sparked the motivation for this post.

Web analysts love to tout their analytics tools and how they are able to track every cent of their online marketing budget. For this reason, the adoption of these tools typically occurs within the online marketing department while the rest of the web design/development departments stay out of the way and just take the lead from the analysts. It’s time to clue them in; it’s time to make them feel like their daily tasks are no longer just part of the grind; every change they make affects the bottom line.