A recent Nieslen report concluded that shoppers are been driven to brick and mortar stores through search. This makes sense and many of our customers have said that they see the same thing happening: people will use their online store to decide what they want, then go to their local store to make the purchase. This knowledge is extremely important when you’re trying to measure the return on investment of your paid search campaign, or your search engine optimization efforts.

The beauty of on-line marketing is that you can measure the return on investment because you can track clicks through to purchases. Right? The tracking doesn’t work if the person stops clicking, walks down to the store and makes the purchase.

This means that some of your on-line marketing spend is going to be as difficult to track as your offline spend. People and organizations with experience in measuring ROI of traditional marketing activities should be able to apply that experience to measure the impact of shopping on-line and buying off-line. This can be included in your ROI calculations for your on-line campaigns and ultimately reflected in the price you’re willing to bid for keywords.