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Earlier this month, Econsultancy ran a blog about the strategies marketers use to sync offline marketing activity with online conversion rates. “Five Simple Attribution Black Holes to Look out for in Reporting” gave readers a rundown of many of the tactics companies employ to try to figure out the impact non-Internet advertising has on Internet browsing and purchasing choices, as well as other cross-channel marketing challenges. The writer mentioned vanity URLs, QR codes and other piecemeal tactics.  Linking offline and online activity is something we spend lots of time thinking about, and we have seen too many cases where these tactics produce inaccurate results.   When it comes to linking TV advertising to online activity, for example, there is a better way.

Your customers now cross freely between marketing channels, and there’s a good chance they’re surfing the Web on a tablet or smartphone when your TV spot airs. Looking only at things like vanity URLs doesn’t properly take into account the utilization rate, and can lead to false conclusions.  For example, we have seen cases where nighttime comedy programs might have a vanity URL or code utilization rate as high as 80 percent, whereas daytime TV and dramas might have a utilization of only 20 percent.  Not knowing these utilization differences would lead you to think that the nighttime comedy program was four times more effective, when in fact as many or more people might be responding to other programs and just not using the code.

However, it isn’t necessary to rely on these methods. By using algorithms to analyze traffic and conversion metrics on your website before and after the ad airs, you can correlate offline ad log data to online visits, without messing around with imprecise tactics. You’ll get more nuanced, accurate insight into customer behavior, so you can make better decisions about ad spend and multi-channel campaigns.

This type of cross-channel analysis lets you:
• Compare the number of first-time visitors (as well as other relevant metrics like conversions) to your website pre- and post-airing of the spot in question.
• Conduct this comparison over a dynamically calculated time period that is as short as possible, while remaining statistically confident.
• Use the short time window to eliminate any external influences, such as variations resulting from the time of day, but normalize the response to further cleanse the data of externalities.
• Attribute some conversions that include interactions with online advertising channels and take place after the spot’s flight (the so-called “halo” effect) to television by applying coefficients calculated using linear regression, heuristics and cross-client benchmarking.

These capabilities infuse confidence and predictability into the marketing mix, so that companies can determine the individual return on channel investment and how each asset influences the customer’s full path to conversion. With this information, you can generate optimizations ranging from reallocation of budget to various networks or programs, all the way to creative-level adjustments. The result is a more effective marketing strategy without the blind spots that come from slapdash measurement practices. To learn more about how Convertro can help you measure the impact of your TV ads, visit our TV and radio optimization page.