5 Ways to Track Offline Conversions from Your PPC Efforts

Paid Media / November 20, 2008

Paid search is a great way to drive online conversions, sales, leads, signups, downloads, you name it. But what about tracking those pesky conversions that take place offline that you got because of your paid search efforts?

We come across many businesses that struggle with this challenge so here are 5 ways you can better measure how your PPC Campaigns are actually performing.

1.  Serve Different Phone Numbers

Use javascript on the landing pages to identify the source of the traffic (Ex: Google Adwords, Y!SM, Microsoft Adcenter – you could even go more granular to the campaign level depending on your needs) and serve up a unique phone number so that when a call is taken you’ll know how they found you.

This strategy uses cookies so that as visitors navigate your site, the same phone number is shown to them (You’ll want to make sure that you use persistent cookies rather than session cookies so that the same phone number will be displayed to the same visitor upon repeat visits from them).

2. Use Different Pricing

Display different pricing on your landing pages where you change something like the last digit in the price depending on the PPC campaign that drove the visit. Ex: $199.99 for Adwords, $199.97 for Yahoo and $199.95 for Microsoft Adcenter.

3. Use Offer / Coupon Codes

Include offer or coupon codes on your PPC landing pages that visitors can use on the phone or bring in to your bricks and mortar (offline) stores. The only way visitors can get these coupons is if they came in from paid search traffic or if someone who did passes on the coupon code.

4. Dig Into Analytics

If you’re an ecommerce based business that still gets a lot of sales offline by phone, you can often spot trends to help you see how your paid search campaigns are influencing your offline sales.

For example, we discovered that one of our clients had a higher than average bounce rate on one specific brand and they confirmed that their phone sales were also soft for this brand. After exploring further we discovered that they were not competitively priced so we stopped advertising on this brand and shifted their paid search budget to better selling ones.

Result: Average order value doubled and they hit their previous month’s sales revenue in half the time after the switch.

5. Ask Your Customers How They Found Out About You

This is not very scientific, but will give you an idea over time how people are finding out about you. If they came in from a search engine, they most likely will be able to tell you which one and maybe even what they searched for. Granted there are still a lot of people that don’t know the difference from an organic listing to a sponsored one so you’ll still want to use the above strategies to get a clearer picture.

These strategies will help give you a clearer picture of the true value of your paid search campaigns. So before you pull the plug on your campaign or declare “My campaigns are not working!” give them a try.

Using a similar strategy or completely different one to track offline conversions generated from your PPC advertising? We’d love to hear about it – as would our readers so be sure to add a comment!