Today Online Conversions tend to be the main focus for most digital marketers. But one cannot discount the value Offline Conversions bring to any digital marketing strategy. Offline Conversions occur when a customer takes action outside the digital world – such as visiting a physical store, making a phone call, etc.

This is crucial because it allows marketers to measure the effectiveness of their online campaigns. It helps them understand how their marketing efforts can translate into offline sales and customer behavior.    

Offline Conversions can refer to the action of tracking and measuring the impact of online advertising on customer behavior that takes place outside of the digital environment. This means that offline conversions refer to any action or behavior that happens in the physical world, such as a customer placing a phone call or visiting a store and purchasing in-person after being exposed to an online advertisement.  

Offline Conversion Tracking refers to the process of monitoring and measuring customer interactions and conversions that take place outside the digital environment, such as in physical stores or over the phone, which is known as offline conversion tracking.

Benefits of Offline Conversions Tracking

Conversion tracking is when a brand monitors the actions consumers take toward the completion of a business goal. These actions can include signing up for a newsletter, downloading a content offer, or adding an item to a cart. Conversion tracking is a way to determine the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, design change, and other marketing components as consumers move toward conversion.

What Conversion Goals Should Be Tracked?

Conversion tracking tools like Google Analytics require account managers to define measurable goals for conversion. Goals are typically connected to specific pages, events, or other products and services.

Examples of Conversion Goals:  

• Direct people to a physical store location
• Increase site visitors
• Contact a business via call or message
• Add item to cart
• Make a purchase
• Sign-up for a newsletter
• Download content offer
• Play a video

By tracking conversions, businesses determine their most valuable marketing channels via conversion attribution or giving a particular channel credit for a conversion. They have greater insight into how to allocate their marketing budget and resources based on their highest-performing channels for conversions, such as social media networks.

Tracking the Right KPIs

There are a variety of key performance indicators related to conversions themselves and other metrics that suggest the effectiveness of conversion efforts.

Examples of KPIs for conversion:  

• Number of conversions
• Conversion rate
• Cost per conversion/acquisition
• Bounce rate
• Pages per visit
• Hits on destination page
• Events (played videos, download content)
• Session duration

KPIs like conversion rate evaluate conversions themselves while metrics like events take into account actions that will eventually lead to conversions.

How do I calculate Conversion rate?

To calculate Conversion rate, divide the total number of conversions by your desired metric (clicks, ad impressions, sessions on-site, etc).

Your KPIs will indicate how well or how close you are to meet your goal. For example, if your goal is to increase the number of purchases for an e-commerce site, one target KPI is the number of customers who land on a “Thank you page” after buying an item.

You can also track KPIs for consumers who are close to meeting a conversion goal and then take steps to ensure the completion of your goal. If a customer adds an item to a shopping cart but abandons the cart, you can use a re-targeting campaign via Google AdWords to display ads for the abandoned items and increase the chance of a conversion.

Maximizing your return on investment (ROI)

Conversion tracking can reveal whether you are seeing an adequate return on investment (ROI), also known as return on ad spend (ROAS), for advertising campaigns.

Allocating your budget

Your ROI and ROAS can inform your budget structure.  For instance – you have two sub-projects running, a social media advertising campaign and an email marketing campaign. But your conversion tracking shows a higher ROI on your email campaigns. Here’s the point where you might want to allocate/ divert more money to your email marketing campaign.

Identifying opportunities for improvement

If you notice that certain campaign approaches aren’t converting as well as others, you can compare these campaigns with more successful ones to identify potential change areas. For example, if you see several campaigns that target one keyword converting more than campaigns that target another, you’ll know to focus on the higher-performing keyword.

Distinguishing clicks from conversions

Clicks and conversions aren’t always synonymous. In fact, sometimes, high click rates can obscure low conversion rates. With conversion tracking, you can determine the relationship between click rates and the achievement of your desired conversion.

Types of Conversion KPIs to track

Conversion tracking helps you understand how your customers engage with your business and take desirable actions, whether signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.

• A Conversion is a customer action aligned with the goals of your marketing or advertising campaigns.
• Conversion tracking is the monitoring of conversions to assess the success of your campaigns.
• Tracking Conversions can maximize your ROI, inform your budget, identify improvement areas, and distinguish clicks from conversions.

For instance, you’ve recently wrapped up a marketing campaign that did not produce results. You take a different approach, but that fails. Instead of randomly trying another style, let conversion tracking show you where your strengths and weaknesses lie.  With this, you can easily determine whether your advertising campaigns are leading to your desired goals.  

All three of these functions need to recognize that the value of direct engagements with the customers will increase. And that has implications from a marketing as well as technology perspective. Because ultimately, what advertisers need to think is, “how are we going to create those consumer connections?” Those valuable engagements happen across multiple touchpoints and the leadership team needs to think about how they can build the brand ecosystem around this reality.

Technology, information management, and marketing need to figure out effective ways to build direct relationships with their consumers. Creating a two-way value exchange in which the consumer gets something, and the brand gets their data, will be mutually rewarding. The bottom line is that these functions need to orchestrate how this new operating model works across the organization.

It is easier said than done but communication is key. Asking the right questions and collectively exploring solutions can work wonders and help navigate the toughest conversations. Business leaders are custodians of their respective brands and must put themselves in the customer’s shoes.

Here are some key questions that can serve as a crude checklist to set the foundation of a first-party data ecosystem.

In today’s digital era, with thousands of brands reaching consumers across a million touch-points with myriad communications, consumers find comfort in a long-lasting relationship with their preferred brand and block away the overwhelming persuasions of all others. Hence, emerges the need for building a consumer relationship lifecycle.   

The emergence of the consumer relationship life cycle is a concept that has gained significant importance in recent years, particularly with the increasing use of first-party data. The consumer relationship life cycle refers to the various stages that a consumer goes through when interacting with a brand or company. These stages include awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. The emergence of this concept has been driven by the need for companies to better understand their customers and develop more personalized marketing strategies.

Digital Marketing Maturity is a measure of how well a company has embraced digital marketing as a strategy for achieving its business objectives. It takes into account various aspects such as the company’s digital capabilities, organizational structure, processes, and culture.

For CMOs and their digital marketing organizations, the changes of the past few years have come fast, and their full impact has yet to be felt. Two big shifts stand out. The pandemic compressed several years of digital market evolution into a few months as consumers raced online to do everything from purchasing daily necessities to seeking medical treatment. At the same time, the data stream provided by third-party cookies—one of the critical supports of precision digital marketing—began to dwindle as the industry and regulators reacted to growing concerns about privacy. Meanwhile, consumers’ expectations for more customized, even personalized, outreach and interaction continued to grow.

Many companies have responded to these sea changes with speed and agility. Others have been slower to react. The big difference is the extent to which each company has advanced its digital marketing maturity.  

ON24 – a leading digital engagement platform that drives pipeline and revenue growth, released the results of their latest survey, “The State of Digital Maturity in Europe: The Tools, Techniques, and Strategies Marketers Need to Drive Results.” Based on responses from over 800 marketing leaders across 12 countries in Europe, this survey examines digital maturity across marketing organizations and finds that the top-performing businesses are backed by a digitally mature marketing team.

Datahash is proud to announce that we are now ISO 27001:2013 Certified and SOC 2 Type 2 Compliant. The industry-acknowledged certification and report attest to our commitment to safeguarding customer data while prioritizing data protection and security.  

The ISO/IEC 27001:2013 Certification specifies the requirements for establishing, implementing, and continually improving an information security management system within the context of the organization. It demonstrates that Datahash has invested in the people, processes, and technology (e.g., tools and systems) to protect the organization’s data and provides an independent, expert assessment of whether your data is sufficiently protected.   

SOC 2 Type 2 Report is an audit that validates whether Datahash’s security practices and controls meet the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) Trust Service Principles and Criteria for System and Organization Control. It specifies how organizations should manage customer data based on the Trust Services Criteria (TSC) of Security, Availability, and Confidentiality.  

With cloud-hosted applications proliferating, compliance is fast-growing as a must-have security benchmark for attribution firms. The report is a compliance protocol that assesses whether your organization manages its customers’ data safely and effectively within the cloud. Technology service providers or SaaS companies that manage customer data in the cloud should require to adopt strict compliance practices and therefore consider the SOC 2 Type 2 compliance checklist.   

Akshat Jhanwar, Chief Technology Officer, Datahash, says: “At Datahash, we place great emphasis on maintaining the highest standards of security and privacy in all our operations. Our commitment to these values is reflected in our attainment of SOC2 and ISO 27001 certifications, which serve as a testament to our dedication to ensuring that our customers’ data is processed in a secure and compliant manner. By adhering to these rigorous industry standards, we strive to solidify the trust of our valued customers and provide them with the assurance that their data is in safe hands.”   

Being an early-stage start-up has its challenges, but the team at Datahash made a continual effort to identify and treat risks related to information security. Customer trust is the cornerstone of our work ethic, and we couldn’t have asked for better progress.

Behavioural data reveals the specific ways in which your customer interacts with your business, it could include purchase history and social interactions. This data proves to be extremely valuable to organizations that are looking to create a deep and more targeted experience for customers.  

Access to this kind of data helps marketers and advertisers identify patterns and trends in customer behaviour, and this can be then used to create targeted marketing campaigns and improve overall product offerings. This information can be tracked, collected, and organized into your customer profiles.  

To list a few examples:

Purchase history data describes the products and the services that your customers have purchased in the past – this includes the frequency, quantity, the value of the purchases. Website and app usage data describes how customers interact with your website and mobile app. This again includes how long they stay on a page, the actions taken, and so on and so forth.

Social media engagement data describes how customers engage with social media channels – inclusive of comments, likes, and shares. Marketing campaign data tells how your customers interact with email marketing campaigns – inclusive of open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

Ways in which you can use Behavioral Data

Descriptive data refers to the data that describes or summarizes the characteristics and behavior of a group of customers. This data can be used to gain insight into preferences, habits, and the needs of a company’s customer base, and can help inform marketing and business strategies.

This data can take many forms, including demographic information such as age, gender, income level, and education. This is a good method for your organization to collect and organize descriptive data. This will also help you incorporate specific information about a customer, including the type of house they live in, the lifestyle they lead, and more.

Descriptive data can also be used to identify trends and patterns in customer behavior, such as changes in purchase frequency or shifts in product preferences over time. This information can be used to develop targeted marketing campaigns and improve customer experiences.

Ways in which Descriptive data can be used: