Attribution Modeling with Offline Variables

[PatriotOutfitters81]

Is there a way to say with certainty, "Online marketing generated this sale," when you have a team of sales people and customer service people on the phones? If we can't get as close as to a single transaction, what other indicators can be used to show cause-and-effect that sales increased with online marketing efforts?

[PatriotOutfitters81]

Unlike email campaigns and promotions where I can have a customized URL, my question deals with less trackable efforts. It's mainly about content creation and optimizing individual product pages. With these pages, people can do the following things:

1. Order the product directly on the product page
2. Look at the product page, call up sales for more questions, complete the transaction online.
3. Look at the product page, call up sales, and the sales department makes the order for them.
4. Call up sales, sales directs them to the page, customer looks at page and makes the order online.
5. Call up sales, sales directs them to the page, customer continues conversation with sales as customer looks at page, order done either online or directly by sales.
6. Order the product directly on the page, have some kind of complaint afterwards (not usually the case) and then customer service retains the sale.

So the optimized page helped generate the sale in some form, but who gets the credit for the sale? Did the page generate enough information and was compelling enough for the customer to call up sales for further information? Would the customer have called up sales anyway if the page was not optimized? Did the customer call up sales because the page not optimized enough? If the optimized page made it an easy sale for the sales department, shouldn't online marketing get some of that credit - and by how much? Where can marketing measure its true monetary progress - at first touch, at last touch, or somewhere else?

[StreamlineMetrics]

Are all of your sales done over the phone? Or can customers make a purchase directly on your website or fill out a contact form on your site? Here are several suggestions -

1. Phone call tracking - use different phone numbers to track where the calls are coming from. There are tons of call tracking services out there but www.ifbyphone.com and www.mongoosemetrics.com come to mind.

2. Ecommerce tracking - This is completely dependent on whether or not your business sells products that can be purchased directly through the website. If so, make sure you are tracking these actions with an analytics tool, such as Google Analytics and set up multi-touch conversion tracking.

3. Lead tracking - This is similar to ecommerce tracking in that you can track where the leads are coming from. Usually lead gen sites will collect information through the website and then sales people follow up either via email or over the phone. Oftentimes there is a gap between online marketing and sales because most salesmen will want to take full credit for closing a deal over the phone when in all actuality, the online marketing team should get at least some credit if the initial lead was generated through the website. There is no perfect solution but I'd suggest using multi-touch attribution in Google Analytics in addition to some kind of integrated CRM which keeps track of all potential deals through every step in the pipeline.

If you're not looking for a full blown CRM or enterprise level marketing automation software, another possible solution is to consider trying Convertable, which is a simple lead tracking tool that provides multi-touch attribution for all leads generated through an online form (full disclosure - I am a co-founder of Convertable).

Feel free to update this thread with more information about how your business operates and I will try to provide some more detailed suggestions if necessary.

[Martin_Harris]

Hi Jess,

Has your site visitors increased since you started the online campaign? Take the average increase in offline sales pre-campaign over the average increase in offline sales post campaign. This should give you a rough estimate.

If you want more accurate conversion tracking, Use your sales team to collate data where the referral came, this can be done post sale over the phone or direct mail questionnaire posted with the product.

Hope this helps.