New Study Continues to Confirm Importance of Tracking Offline Conversions

I've written before about the need to come up with a unique way to track the conversions that ultimately end up happening offline, despite starting with an online search query. A new study released today by comScore Networks highlights this need by releasing the latest round of supporting data. The study, titled "The Role of Search in Consumer Buying" found that a quarter of searchers end up purchasing an item directly related to their query, but that only 37% of those buyers ultimately make that purchase online. That leaves 63%, or nearly two thirds of conversions happening in an offline environment where it can be difficult to trace them back to a search marketing campaign.

"The study confirms the important role of search in influencing consumers' purchase behavior both online and offline," said James Lamberti, vice president of comScore Search Marketing Solutions. "Importantly, it's clear from this study that the influence of search on offline buying can often be responsible for the major portion of the overall financial return from investments in search marketing."

The study shows on and offline conversion numbers for a variety of different industries and it's interesting to note that clothing and jewelry tend to result in far more online conversions (35% and 25% respectively) than some items that are typically thought of as being "impulse purchases." To that end, music/movies/videos resulted in just a 17% online conversion rate and video games/consoles showed a paltry 7% conversion rate. In reality, that likely shows that people simply put more time into reading reviews and product specs for things like movies and video games, whereas clothes and jewelry are simply more a matter of taste.