TLDR: Offline conversion tracking is crucial for digital marketers to gain a holistic understanding of campaign performance to optimize strategies effectively. By identifying and tracking specific offline actions across social platforms, advertisers have a more holistic picture of performance to better refine targeting, messaging, and can allocate budgets more strategically. Despite its benefits, offline tracking does come with its own challenges. Data integration complexities, privacy concerns, and difficulties attributing offline actions accurately are among the few that advertisers are up against. However, with proper implementation and attention to these challenges, marketers can harness the power of offline conversion tracking to enhance their overall marketing performance

Before we dive in…

…we wanted to level set on what an offline conversion is and how they work, knowing they still are a crucial piece to the overall buying journey. 

According to a Google study, 88% of individuals who conduct a local search on their smartphone end up visiting a physical store. With consumers constantly connected to their devices these days, one can only imagine the flow of in-store visits today. This raises the question: How do offline conversions stem from online activity?

Why is it important to track offline revenue/events?

Constantly evaluating your marketing strategies is a critical component to discern your overall strategy effectiveness. Just as we monitor online conversions, it’s equally important to comprehensively track offline conversions. Knowing 45% of consumers still shop primarily in-store and often drive a majority of retailer revenues, it’s imperative that we are able to include this data in reporting for media plan recommendations and strategy optimizations. Ultimately, this will ensure a holistic understanding of our campaigns and their impact, encompassing both online and offline channels.

Our top 3 reasons for tracking offline revenue and events:

1. You get a more complete picture of campaign performance: tracking offline conversions allows us to have a more comprehensive view of the entire customer journey, from initial exposure to the final purchase made in a physical store.
   
2. You’re able to make strategic budget recommendations and pivot allocations accordingly: by tracking offline conversions, we can identify campaigns that drive the most significant offline impact. This knowledge helps in allocating budgets more effectively, directing resources towards the most profitable and impactful avenues.
   
3. It helps refine your optimization strategies: insights from offline tracking allow for better targeting, messaging, and optimization strategies, leading to improved overall campaign performance.

How does the offline conversion process work?

1. Identify main offline KPIs: these are specific offline actions or events that need to be tracked, such as in-store purchases or other offline interactions relevant to business goals, and ensure the appropriate parameters are in place to track accordingly.
   
2. Upload Offline Event Data: platforms supporting offline event tracking allow you to upload aggregated offline event data. This typically includes data on the specific offline actions taken by customers.
   • PRO TIP💡: Platforms automatically generate unique identifiers for customers during online interactions. Examples: email addresses, phone numbers, or other PID gathered from online engagements (e.g. ad clicks or web visits). Platforms will need similar information from offline event source data to match back to users in the platform, too. 
     
3. Attribution and Analysis: The platform matches the offline event data with online interactions based on unique identifiers (from online interactions, like ad clicks or website visits). This attribution process attributes conversions back to the specific campaigns or interactions that initiated the offline actions.
4. Optimization and Decision-Making: Analyze the attributed conversions to understand the relationship and impact of online channels to offline actions. Use these insights to optimize future campaigns, refine targeting strategies, inform audience strategies, and enhance overall marketing performance.

What are the offline tracking options across the different platforms?

The good news is, the majority of the platforms support similar integrations and tracking across offline events. Our recommendation is to onboard a direct partner integration that uploads data at least daily (and refreshed uploads throughout the day will only help for real-time optimization!), in addition to a Conversions/Events API integration. 

META	Conversions API or Offline Conversions API Partner integration (Example: LiveRamp) Direct uploads
TIKTOK	Events API Partner integration (Example: LiveRamp) Direct uploads
SNAPCHAT	Conversions API Partner integration (Example: LiveRamp)
PINTEREST	Partner integration (Example: LiveRamp) Direct uploads
REDDIT	Conversions API
LINKEDIN	Partner integration (Example: LiveRamp) Direct API or manual uploads

What is a Conversions or Events API? 

Conversions/Events API is a tool that enables businesses to track actions or events, such as ad clicks, website visits, and online and in-store purchases. It utilizes a server-to-server connection, ensuring reliability over cookies in the event of signal loss on a browser. Additionally, the API offers other important benefits such as enhanced data accuracy, real-time data updates, and custom attribution models. Marketers can gain comprehensive insights into campaign performance across channels, make strategic budget allocations based on combined impact, and refine optimization strategies for overall paid social performance. Although Conversions/Events API is not required for enabling Offline Reporting on most platforms, enabling CAPI does offer several advantages.

Because we know there’s bound to be some, what are the potential hurdles and challenges to offline event passbacks?

While offline data passback will only help enhance reporting and optimization potential, it can come with some challenges. See below for a few of our watch-outs and don’t hesitate to reach out to our team for further assistance and exploration! 

Data Integration:

Combining offline data with online interactions from various sources can be complex. Integration issues might arise due to disparate data formats, incompatible systems, or incomplete data sets, leading to inaccuracies in attribution.

Privacy and Compliance:

Adhering to privacy regulations while collecting and utilizing customer data for offline tracking is crucial, especially after the iOS privacy changes. Ensuring the proper handling and secure storage of PII poses a challenge in tracking offline conversions effectively.

Identifying Unique Offline Actions (Deduplication):

Defining and capturing all possible offline actions accurately and attributing them to specific online interactions can be challenging. Deduplication presents challenges due to varying data formats, high volumes, incomplete entries, algorithmic complexities, and privacy concerns.

Cross-Device Attribution:

Tracking a customer’s journey across multiple devices (from online interactions on mobile devices to offline purchases in-store) poses a challenge. Ensuring accurate attribution of conversions across various devices used by a single user is complex but essential for holistic tracking.

Delayed or Incomplete Data:

Offline conversions might not be immediately captured or reported, leading to delays in data availability. Moreover, incomplete or delayed reporting of offline actions might impact the accuracy and timeliness of attribution.

Limited Tracking Options:

Some offline interactions (such as cash transactions or rebates) might be challenging to track effectively. Limited tracking options for certain offline activities can hinder comprehensive attribution efforts.

So what now?

As we wrap things up, we can’t stress it enough: offline conversion tracking is crucial for digital marketers to gain a holistic understanding of campaign performance to optimize strategies effectively. The process can take time and resources, but our team of digital experts is always here to help. Drop us a line here!