Thursday, April 27  

Online Search A Powerful Driver Of Offline Sales

Online Search A Powerful Driver Of Offline Sales

Anecdotally, I've always known that our web clients generate a lot of their sales from people who originally found them through their web site. Often on a web site there will be multiple ways to contact the business to buy:

• direct online sale
• phone number
• email address
• email form

Now quite often only the direct online sales - where the buyer uses an online form and their credit card to buy - is counted as a web site sale.

Almost Impossible To Quantify

But depending on the industry the sales generated by the web site that are completed offline would be as much as 50% in my experience. But because that's almost impossible to quantify (client's don't often measure the source of customers) it's difficult to make any certain statements.

Our eczema and psoriasis treatment web site gets 11% of total sales via fax orders. And another 3% via telephone orders.

And I know that some resort web sites we manage get as many bookings via the phone originating from the web site as they do via the online booking form.
Study Finds The Majority Of Searchers Purchase Offline

According to an article from Internetretailer.com of 83 million Americans tracked by comScore who searched at one of the 24 top search engines in November and December, 25% purchased an item relating to their query, and of that number, the majority Â? 63% -- completed that purchase offline.

And something relevant for my holiday resort clients: "56% of consumers' online holiday buying actually occurred in subsequent Internet sessions, not the session in which a search originated."

Search engine marketing works and it works well. And going by this sort of data it works even better than I've always known.

Cheers

Brendon