Online Marketing Driving Offline Sales: So, Does That Work?

Basically, yeah, it works.

It began with the givens: online advertising has been shown to be an effective means of driving direct response. In support of this, Dave Smith, CEO of Mediasmith and our moderator, rolled out the fact that more than 1,500 studies found in favor of the internet as a branding medium. Rebecca Lieb presented the only other sure thing in correlating offline results with online activity: e-coupons.  She went on to note several other methods of tracking activity between the two channels, useful when an e-coupon for $1 off your new Wega won’t exactly cut it:

• data exchange: providing one’s email address signifies intent to purchase, if not an actual sale
• on-pack: where customers enter codes from physical products online for some reward in what is essentially the e-coupon mechanism backwards, e.g. the Pepsi-iTunes promotion
• recipe cards: which goal is to guide a customer to perform a certain behavior
• stat sheets: a checklist of sorts, for a product with multiple features

For those astute readers who noted that the last two don’t include any tracking mechanisms, that’s because they don’t, but marketers can add them where appropriate. Also note that tactics need to be tuned to reflect the product category and consumer purchase consideration and involvement level.

Next, Steve Warshaw presented a collaboration between his company (ACNielsen) and Yahoo that brought some accountability to online advertising.  ACNielsen’s Homescan panel matched purchase behavior with surfing behavior in order to target positively inclined respondants to certain promotions. The project involved extrapolating this across Yahoo’s entire online database to select the right web users hit. Reported lifts in sales ranged from 100 percent to 400 percent. Marketing dollars were maximized because of the efficiency of behavioral targeting (preaching to the choir here) and the change in sales could be accurately attributed to online efforts to return an impressive ROI.

Stephen Kim, Director of Ad Sales Research for Microsoft, also brought some web portal marketing findings to the table. He looked at online marketing not only in terms of promotions, but in terms of branding as well, and had a helpful grid (if you want to be guaranteed admittance to the Ad:Tech speaker alumni club, you need a grid) with sales on one axis and branding on the other to emphasize the interaction between the two. In addition to the usual successful case studies, one interesting finding was that brand-focused ads increased purchases more than sales-focused ads did. Another recommendation was to do a campaign post-mortem looking at payback by channel and adjust your resource allocation accordingly. He finished off with some peeks into the future of this kind of controlled research, where every kind of comparison can be made to determine optimal audience, creative and media placement.