Of all conversions, 92 percent take place offline

I have been shouting from the rooftops for months now, at everyone that would listen that it is so important to track your offline conversions. I have thought for ages now that a large majority of conversion happened when a customer picked up their telephone and ordered the product over the phone. Or in some cases search on the interet for a product and went to visit a physical store location and made a purchase.

A recent study by ComScore & Overture followed searchers 12 weeks from a "start query" for computer or consumer electronic products to their eventual purchase for. Of all conversions, 92 percent took place offline.

Excerpt from Clickz Online...

The Killer Finding

Would you structure an offline marketing campaign based on the buying behavior of only 8 percent of your audience? If your search ad campaign's success in this vertical is measured only by conversions on your Web site, you're missing 92 percent of search-generated buyers. You're literally optimizing a search spend to maximize conversions on only the tiniest sliver of the potential buying audience. Chances are, these aren't the only online vertical markets with offline conversion dramatically exceeding the online opportunity.

This means retailers who focus only on online return on investment (ROI) could choose to spend 10 times more on search marketing than they currently are and still net positive ROI. By underspending, they fail to reach the majority of their potential customers.

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