With advances in marketing technology, new tools are emerging that help marketers understand the effectiveness of their offline channels in addition to online digital channels.  Until recently, budgets spent on radio and TV advertisements, for example, resulted in black holes when it came to answering very reasonable questions like, “was that campaign worth our money?” or “does radio marketing really work?“.

To get a complete picture of Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), marketers must include both online and offline channels in their analysis. Entire customer journeys need to be tracked, and that includes offline channels like TV and radio, as well as online channels and even phone calls. Data volumes can be huge, of course, with potentially hundreds of ads running simultaneously, millions of customers participating in campaigns, and dozens of conversion points. With new tools that incorporate real-time warehousing of this data, marketers can now understand the customer journey without spending hours to bring all the elements together. Strategic decisions about marketing mixes can be made faster and in a more agile fashion, leading to more effective ad spend and reduced waste.

TV and radio present special challenges to attribution models, mostly because we never know with absolute certainty whether or not an individual saw or heard an ad. What we DO know, is that often there will be an increase in direct traffic to websites after a TV or radio spot has aired. Capturing this data and looking at the decay of this increase over time can help attribute broadcast campaigns (like OTT ads) to conversions.  This type of analysis used to cost an arm and a leg for high-end consulting and custom software, but today’s marTech has solutions that can do it for 10x less. Can you say conversions rose 5% as a result of that TV or radio ad? Sure!  And it’s precisely this type of analysis that every marketer needs to understand if their broadcast spend is paying off.

Think about including offline channels in your attribution modeling. Looking at digital only may only be part of the answer and in fact can give misleading results. Look for marTech software that lets you see the effect of offline programs in the same way that digital is viewed for a complete view of the customer journey.