Connecting offline and online is a long-standing dream of performance professionals. Why? Advertisers are aiming for cross-media ad campaigns, and recent digital trends are a great help in this.
While online activity analytics provides enough data for e-commerce, sometimes such analytics are not enough for a business where the main buying activity is offline. For companies where some of the purchases are made online, some are offline, linking online advertising and real purchases is the key to a full-fledged analytics and an effective sales strategy.
This dream is not so far from reality. Moreover, a whole pool of advertising tools at the junction of online and offline already exists and is actively used. Implement and be on trend! And we will tell you how.
Facebook offline audiences
Facebook has learned to associate offline conversions with ads. Users who have connected the Offline Events section in Business Manager can now see what events — for example, in-store purchases or over the phone — occurred after viewing ads on Facebook.
Offline events from Facebook analyze the offline business audience (you upload its data in a special section) and the audience of your online advertising. The social network compares the data and determines how many people who bought a product in an offline store learned about you or your product through online advertising. So, now the business will be able to track the impact of advertising on the social network on real sales.
“Offline events” in Facebook are located in the Business Manager section, in the “Resources” tab, there are also detailed instructions on how to use it:
Click the Get Started and Upload button to add your offline customer details. After that, Facebook will ask you to include descriptors and event identifiers, it is not necessary to fill in all the fields, but it is useful for detailed analysis of the audience by the social network.
Event descriptors are the time and name of the event, cost, currency, and order number. Event identifiers are information about the buyer: name, surname, phone number, city, country, date of birth. Bonus – using this data, you can create an audience for advertising in the “Audiences” section of the Business manager.
PVL in Yandex.Metrica
In October 2017, Yandex.Metrica presented a new report that allows you to assess the impact of online placements on the real volume of visitors to a point of sale.
To assess this impact, the PVL (place visits lift) indicator is used – a comparison of conversions to offline visits among the audience who saw the advertisement and / or visited the site, and the audience that was not touched through online activity.
PVL is of two types:
- Postclick PVL: allows you to analyze data on site visitors.
- Postview PVL: allows you to evaluate data on the audience who saw the banner or video, but may not have been on the site.
PVL Metrics reports are detailed at different levels, arranged according to different sections, for example, by traffic sources. With UTM markup, you can get even more data:
With the help of PVL, you can track how much more willing site visitors who saw your promo video on YouTube and went to your site came to your offline store compared to organic visitors. With the help of PVL, you can understand which campaign in Yandex.Direct brings more visitors offline – PVL can be tracked down to the keyword level.
Detailing also goes in the context of the number of days that have passed since the moment of touching an online advertisement or going to the site: PVL-1, 3 and 7.
How does Yandex know about points of sale?
This data is pulled from Yandex.Directory. For each offline point, you can define the PVL separately. The calculation can be done for all stores in the region and across the country.
How are offline visits generally calculated?
Of course, complete information on the methodology for linking offline visits and online channels is not publicly available. Basic calculation methods:
Yandex services aggregate geolocation data of visitors… The smartphone’s geolocation system service transmits device location data to Yandex applications. The system uses this data and decides that the visit took place if the device was delayed for a certain time at a point that coincides with a separate building. But how, in this case, to define visits to a store, if, say, it is not in a separate building, but in a shopping center? In this case, WiFi analytics is used.
WiFi analytics… Visitor data is collected using WiFi sensors that can be installed in a store, cafe or restaurant – in general, in any offline point of the business. The smartphone of a visitor to such a point automatically exchanges information with a Wi-Fi sensor, it is enough that Wi-Fi is turned on on the device, connection to the network is not necessary. This data is transmitted to the system in encrypted form and in anonymized form is used to calculate PVL.
Billboards from Yandex
Billboards from Yandex (DOOH or Digital-Out-Of-Home) are banners with digital advertising that count and measure offline audience. So, outdoor advertising from Yandex combines offline and online: these are quite material banners on the streets of the city, but, unlike traditional ones, they receive data about viewers, on which it will subsequently be possible to target advertising.
How to measure people who see outdoor ads?
The methodology for measuring contacts with Yandex billboards is called OTS (opportunity to see). OTS – the number of audience contacts with an advertising message on a billboard. Each advertising surface has a unique visibility zone and is calculated taking into account its size, the angle of rotation in relation to the road, and message interferences.
Ads are sold using the auction model. Customers specify bids and budget, while Yandex algorithms figure out where and when to show ads. Payment for digital advertising on billboards is based on the model per thousand OTS.
The advertiser processes geodata and receives events of the following type: “The car drove in the visibility zone of the shield at a certain speed in a certain direction during a measured period of time.”
Formula for calculating OTS:
Why is this cool?
The OTS of the commercial is evaluated in real time, taking into account the location of the user, the speed and direction of his movement. A number of indicators are analyzed: socio-demographic characteristics, interests, audience categories. A segment based on anonymized data obtained from outdoor advertising can be used for retargeting in Yandex.Direct.
Yandex promises that the launch of such advertising will be possible independently through the Direct interface.
Indoor advertising based on face recognition
In the summer, Yandex and the Addreality platform launched indoor advertising based on face recognition. A screen with a video camera in the room reads information when a person approaches it. The data is sent to Yandex.Display, and the person is shown offers that are potentially interesting to him. This is the first Russian experience in implementing programmatic indoor advertising sales.
What kind of ad will be shown to me?
The screen collects information about the gender and age of the client and displays ads based only on this data. Sometimes other data is also read, such as glasses or a beard. The algorithm does not identify buyers, does not use personal information, and does not record video of buyers passing by the screen. You can launch such an advertising campaign through Yandex.Display.
The ASNA pharmacy chain is the first company to launch advertising in its halls. The novelty was also tested by Victoria supermarkets.
Data security
The data obtained with the help of trackers is transmitted to Yandex via closed channels along with the client counter ID in Metrica. This means that data about offline visitors is available only to the client as the owner of the meter. All data are received in an impersonal and aggregated form. No personal data is transferred … but from now on, tick the application access checkboxes meaningfully.
What’s next
The future of online advertising lies in classroom solutions. Soon, creating and customizing offline audience segments will be as fast and easy as online audience segments. A few years ago it seemed impossible, now it is quite real.
