It’s no secret that eCommerce has seen some great advancements over the past few years, particularly with the proliferation of digital marketing. But so far, companies have struggled to bridge the gap between their online and offline marketing campaigns in terms of understanding which strategies actually drive sales.

It’s estimated 90 percent of retail sales still happen in brick-and-mortar stores, but with so many digital marketing components at play for the average business, how much of this profit is attributable to online marketing spend?

Advancements in Campaign Tracking

This concept is called offline attribution—understanding which online marketing channels drive the bulk of offline sales. To meet these goals, companies are advancing the way we look at digital marketing and are more tightly integrating their current assets to find these insights:

• Sophisticated paid search campaign studies are increasing, each of which provide data to better define connections between offline and online channels;
• Per Google, offline attribution is possible through the use of mobile location tracking data tied to search queries, a new metric called Store Visit Conversions;
• The increasing use of My Business listings for local businesses and other web-based snippets that let users directly attribute traffic to specific website components.

But companies like Google are taking things even further. The company is leveraging its considerable mapping tools and geographic tracking technology to better define in-store locations. This means that Google will have more insight than ever into the physical locations of each business to complement its arsenal of user-submitted search data—the perfect recipe for offline attribution.

As time goes on, we expect more companies to begin tracking these metrics and leveraging these strategies to learn what’s truly driving their sales.