What is ROPO reporting? ROPO reporting (Research Online Purchase Offline) allows multichannel retailers to see what volume of in-store sales have been influenced by online ads. Working with DID, we created a robust way to measure the offline value of both PPC and SEO activity online. This gives you the customer data that you'll need to match offline conversions with your online advertising activity. Google ROPO reporting DID Electrical were a perfect business to develop a ROPO report for. PPC results of ROPO reporting First of all, we found 47% of offline customers had visited the DID Electrical website prior to visiting the store and making a purchase. SEO results of ROPO reporting This method of ROPO reporting also means we can check the value of an organic click-through using the same reverse-engineering we used for PPC clicks. Getting started with ROPO reporting If you're a digital marketer within a multichannel retailer and you want to get started with ROPO reporting, the key factor is your in-store digital touchpoint. ROPO Cheat Guide (or quick reference) If you're a multichannel retailer and this all sounds tantalizing, here’s the customer journey which ROPO measures: Customer researches online using your website Customer makes purchase in your brick-and-mortar store Customer agrees to receive an e-receipt or warranty delivered to their email address Customer clicks a competition link in the communication they receive This action is captured in your Google Analytics as a custom goal completion You can now calculate ROAS (Return On Advertising Spending) The two critical steps here are the digital touchpoint in your physical stores and the incentive for the customer’s post-conversion communication click. Once you have this touchpoint and interaction, measuring Facebook's social ROPO is a simple file upload and using what I’ve shown you above, you’ll be able to measure the ROPO impact of PPC and SEO too.
Digital marketers have always had one drum they loudly beat in front of traditional advertising channels: “We can measure what we do better than you.” Now, we weren’t embellishing the truth or anything — we can measure digital advertising performance at a much more granular level than we can traditional advertising. But it’s not perfect. Multichannel digital marketing teams always have one niggling thought that keeps them awake at night: online activity is driving in-store sales and we can’t claim any credit for it.
Offline sales are happening. Sure enough, we’re seeing online shopping become more and more popular, but even so, you’ll never see 100% of your sales being made online if you’re a multichannel retailer. Whether it’s a dress that needs to be tried on or a TV you want to measure up before you buy, in-store purchases are going nowhere. But it’s more important than ever to make sure you don’t underestimate the impact your online advertising has on offline sales.
ROPO: Research Online Purchase Offline has plagued multichannel retailers for years. This is when awareness and hot leads are generated online, but the customers convert in-store.
There is one other problem hampering many multichannel businesses: viewing their online store as “just another store” and, in many cases, the store managers themselves considering the website to be a competitor.
In this article, I’ll show you how we’ve improvised to create a ROPO report for DID Electrical, an Irish electrical and home appliance multichannel retailer, to provide greater insight into their customers’ multichannel journey and how this affected their business.
What is ROPO reporting?
Offline conversions are a massive blind spot for digital marketers. It’s the same as someone else taking credit for your work: your online ads are definitely influencing shoppers who complete their purchase offline, but we can’t prove it. Or at least we couldn’t prove it — until now.
ROPO reporting (Research Online Purchase Offline) allows multichannel retailers to see what volume of in-store sales have been influenced by online ads. Facebook has trail-blazed in this area of reporting, leaving Google in their wake and scrambling to keep up. I know this well, because I work on Wolfgang’s PPC team and gaze enviously at the ROPO reporting abilities of our social team. Working with DID, we created a robust way to measure the offline value of both PPC and SEO activity online.
To create a ROPO report, multichannel retailers must have a digital touch point in-store. This isn’t as complicated as it sounds and can be something like an e-receipt or warranty system where you email customers. This gives you the customer data that you’ll need to match offline conversions with your online advertising activity.
As I mentioned earlier, Facebook makes this nice and simple. You take the data gathered in-store, upload it to Facebook, and they will match as many people as possible. Our social team is generally seeing a 50% match rate between the data gathered in-store and Facebook users who’ve seen our ads. You can watch two of my colleagues, Alan and Roisin, discussing social ROPO reporting in an episode of our new video series, Wolfgang Bites:
Clearly, ROPO reporting is potentially very powerful for social media marketers, but Google doesn’t yet provide a way for me to simply upload offline conversion data and match it against people who’ve seen my ads (though they have said that this is coming for Google AdWords). Wouldn’t this be a really boring article for people working in SEO and PPC if I just ended things there?
Google ROPO reporting
DID Electrical were a perfect business to develop a ROPO report for. Founded back in 1968 (happy 50th birthday guys!), a year before tech was advanced enough to put man on the moon,…
COMMENTS