Track Offline Sales With Google Analytics (GA): New Article Shows How

Are you an offline retailer who wonders about the effectiveness of your digital marketing? Wonder no more.
SIA Team
August 23, 2021

If you’re an offline retailer (or really, any results-oriented entrepreneur), you certainly want to maximize the ROI of everything you do. 

And of course, that includes advertising. 

Online advertising. To drive offline sales.

But even if you know if it works or not, the question is, how well is my online advertising working to increase sales online? 

And while I’m not sure if you can ever really track with 100% accuracy the ROI of each online ad dollar, you can begin to take steps in that direction. 

That’s what a recent tweet on Google’s Analytics Twitter channel asserts. 

How to Track Offline Conversions in Google Analytics, the article referred to in that tweet, has a surprising admission: it states that, when it comes to tracking offline conversions, tools like Google Analytics (GA) fall short.

What a way to introduce someone to tracking offline conversions using GA. 

That said, it is a valid point, and the good thing is that there are methods you can use to overcome this apparent limitation. And I’ll state it here: you may need additional software to track some of your offline lead activity.

For example, call tracking would need another software that would tie into GA.

For offline leads, a CRM (customer relationship management) tool can be used (and this would have to tie into GA). (That is, it’s another tool not made by Google, but can tie into GA via an API or some sort of software-to-software connection.)

Perhaps the easiest example of offline-to-online sales tracking I can describe has to do with a TV or print add. 

You can have what’s called a vanity URL to track your TV or print ads. A vanity URL, in this case, is just an extension of your main domain name. The extension is essentially coded to track hits that come from an offline source, like your print ad. 

Every hit is tracked, through the funnel down to the sale. 

If hope this shows you how you can track offline sales with an online solution like GA.

Source: Google Analytics Twitter channel