The Top 3 Ways To Optimise For Online and Offline Conversions

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Marin Software’s Jay Revels dishes up his top pointers on converting potential customers.

Most businesses will have a wide variety of customer touch points: website visits, social media interactions, phone calls, email, proposals, quotes, surveys, tech support, ordering, delivery, etc. And whilst it’s an advantage to have a diverse range of touch points, it also brings with it complexity for digital advertisers.

A gap between the online and offline touch points of a business can result in an incomplete picture of paid search performance, as downstream revenue from offline conversions remain unattributed to the keywords and creative that were key to those conversions. In addition, not all interactions result in revenue conversions. The inability to define unique revenue values for each event and tie them to a single customer and keyword, manifests in a bidding strategy that neglects to account for lifetime customer value and fails to calculate optimal keyword bids.

Here are three tips to help search marketers better connect online and offline touch points thereby optimising for online and offline conversions:

1. Use order IDs to track customers

Assigning order IDs allows advertisers to bridge the gap between their data warehouses or CRM systems and online customer activities. Search marketers are not only able to attribute offline conversion and revenue back to the paid click and subsequent online event, but they can also modify attributed revenue based on refunds, cancellations, and other downstream revenue adjustments.

2. Account for multiple conversion events

Different consumers represent different value to your business. For example, a visitor who requests a quote may be worth more than a visitor who signs up for a newsletter. The flexibility to assign a unique value to non-revenue conversion events in this scenario enables advertisers to measure the true value of each visitor and keyword to their business. Tying these events to publisher data allows search marketers to react quickly to top-of-the-funnel activity (where a potential customer is aware of your product/service and is looking for more information), and measure the impact of website engagement on downstream revenue and lifetime customer value.

3. Calculate optimal bids with portfolio optimisation

Maximising conversions or revenue across a set budget requires making spend trade offs between keywords within a portfolio. Calculating optimal bids for all keywords simultaneously enables search marketers to maximise online and offline conversions and revenue across their account while taking into consideration business goals that vary across campaigns, products, services, and other business requirements. This approach to bidding requires an automated solution that can capitalise on new keyword opportunities without a time intensive and expensive “learning” period.

To learn more about how to bridge the gap between online and offline conversions, refer to Marin’s white paper Navigating the New Paid Search Landscape. It is highly recommended for advertisers in the financial services sector, and marketers who operate in competitive markets.

Jay Revels is the managing director, Marin Software APAC

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