Measuring Offline Data in Google Analytics

By Beacon News | Published March 21, 2014 | Categories: Google Analytics

Many businesses with revenue channels other than just their website struggle to attribute the value of their online marketing efforts to the revenue produced through these other channels. Tying your offline data or conversions such as transactions through a call center or through a brick and mortar retail location back to digital marketing efforts has historically been extremely difficult and didn’t produce great data or methods to analyze the data. GA Fusion was designed to help solve this challenge. We’ve built a centralized conversion database that acts as middleware to connect your offline conversions to your online marketing efforts using Google Analytics as the measurement and reporting platform.

We accomplish this through a series of matching algorithms that allows us to actually match offline transactions back to the user’s Google Analytics website session. Because of this, we can attribute these matched transactions back to not only sources and mediums, but can build advanced segments and view the offline data in the same way that we can for online transactions. This also works with both async and Universal Analytics so if you aren’t ready to switch to Universal Analytics just yet, there’s no rush.

By mapping offline data back to Google Analytics visitor sessions, we gain significant insight into better ROI models, attribution models, per visit value models, time to purchase data, and the list goes on. An example of how useful this can be, if you are using adwords or some other CPC, you inevitably have ROI models which will provide you with a point of diminishing return. It is at this point where you’re ROI goes down to the point it is not profitable to continue to spend advertising budget. However, when you see the big picture and can attribute the revenue from your offline revenue channels back to your Adwords ad spend, you ROI models completely shift. This completely changes your point of diminishing return allowing you to accurately identify how much more advertising budget you can spend while still generating a return. This directly results in more profitability which directly impacts your bottom line. So stop leaving money on the table and start seeing the full impact of how your advertising budgets are fully impacting your business. See example Screenshot below.

Not only does the attribution apply to sources and mediums but you can apply these to event tracking, pageviews, feature interactions, custom variables, etc…. The list goes on. Your conversion optimization and split testing using content experiments can now determine how effective certain variations of buttons, images, content, etc… are at generating offline revenue. So if you have a call center, catalog, retail locations, or any other offline revenue channels, GA Fusion is a system you need to consider.

So if this sounds interesting to you and would like to explore further, contact us and we'll be happy to go over this in more detail and get you setup on your free trial.