Question

Topic: Research/Metrics

Avg Online Conversion Rates For Offline Media

Posted by Anonymous on 2/15/2007 at 11:14 AM ET 250 Points
I'm trying to determine the average online conversion rates attributable to vanity urls advertised in TV, Magazines, Outdoor and Digital Out Of Home.

Would anybody have the answers and/or the sources for the answers?

I know that the average online conversion rate, in general, is 2.7%.

But an example of what I'm looking for is if "Magazine X" ran an ad for "Product X," calling readers to log onto "http:\\www.Product X.com\Magazine X" (where "\Magazine X" is the vanity portion of the url).

What would the average online conversion rate be for that media (magazines)... and for each of the other offline media I've mentioned above as well?

Any help/guidance with this would be greatly appreciated!

Best,
Jon Lindquist
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 2/15/2007 at 1:22 PM Accepted
    Welcome. We just had a question about this the other day (altho it was only in reference to TV). Here is the link (hope it works) so you can see previous answers:

    https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstid=16703

    I stand by my original thoughts even with the other media types you are inquiring about. The results are so far below a tenth of a percent as to be meaningless. In addition you are asking about CONVERSION rates - remember, people have to click-thru first.

    To that end i am uncertain where you got the conversion rate of online at 2.7%. Maybe you are quoting an industry-specific number, but on average click-thrus are near 1%, so conversion would of course have to be less - usually significantly so.

    Not to be harsh, but as i alluded to the first inquirer, if these are truly vanity mentions in what is typically ATL/awareness-type messaging, you should really be happy to get even a tiny spike in traffic.

    I'm not saying you should not do it by the way - cost is nothing. But if you really want to drive traffic/conversions, then you've got to dig into the direct-marketing side of the coin (lousy metaphor - sorry).

    Happy to discuss more if you want.


  • Posted by Dawson on 2/16/2007 at 3:23 AM Member
    One quick point - even if you can read some attribution, i'd guess that the top level URL is likely to be the most popular and least trackable one. As consumers get more and more savvy, it's unlikely they are going to be told exactly which part of your website they should land on - especially if it's something as generic as www.productx.com/tvad unless there is some associated promotion.

    An alternative is to use time series techniques to monitor site traffic alongside your marketing or better still analyse your product sales (esp if it's a retail product) against your mix activity.
  • Posted by Dawson on 2/18/2007 at 6:26 AM Member
    yes - absolutely - it can be a powerful technique although online traffic is a notoriously tricky thing to measure. I've run a few projects in the past where we modelled the impact of large off-line campaigns on online web traffic. The key is obviously the relevance of the web site to the proposition - driving people online to show them how great a razor is probably won't get that many hits - getting them to sign up for free movie tickets will get a higher response overall.

    one other point from studies i've conducted in the past - in a mass marketing context, simply looking at click-throughs from online ads (which i don't think you are doing) will often give a misleading ROI - you need to find a framework to analyse all channels simultaneously if you need to balance resources across them all at the same time.
  • Posted by Dawson on 2/22/2007 at 3:50 AM Member
    Yes - although there may be repeat usage to consider as well - i.e. people going to the site once then going back to the root URL at a later date - depends of course on whether there is any reason for them to visit more than once.
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