Consortium to Measure Online Ads' Impact on Offline Sales

A consortium led by Information Resources (IRI) that includes ComScore, predictive marketing firm [x+1] and online research firm Dynamic Logic aims to provide better insight into the effect of online marketing on offline sales.

The partnership’s effort differs from other attempts to gauge the impact of Internet marketing on brick-and-mortar purchasing largely because it is not limited to one online ad platform or Web site, said Robert Tomei, president of consumer and shopper insights for IRI. “We will be able to help identify high-profile consumers and shoppers across 95 percent of all unique visitors online,” he said. “Today there are a number of programs that do that, but they do it within the constructs of one ad network or one social media platform and they’re limited to those specific sites.”

IRI’s consumer panel data “provides segmentation for offline purchase behavior” that is integrated with the online information supplied by [x+1], Dynamic Logic and comScore, said IRI Senior Vice President of Marketing John McIndoe. The services are being offered mainly to consumer packaged goods (CPG) and healthcare manufacturers and retailers hoping to use data about in-store consumer behavior to identify prospective online customers and to measure the in-store sales results of digital media campaigns.

As its part of the consortium, [x+1] released a new digital optimization platform called CPG Connect, which merges its digital media optimization platform’s online targeting abilities with purchase data and ROI analytics from IRI. Dynamic Logic is calling its collaboration with IRI “AdIndex Connects with IRI,” and is including it as part of its DLConnects family of products. Dynamic Logic’s involvement comes on the heels of its recent launch of Adometer, a tool that measures the brand impact of online ads by running brief surveys in between online ad cycles.

Although Tomei would not reveal the names of any clients using the platforms, he said they have been tested on “a number of individual projects over the last six months and the response clients have had are very exciting.”

He said IRI tracks actual purchase behavior to the extent that it knows what brands are being purchased in stores by panelists. “Then we take that group of people to identify high-category brand buyers and we profile them,” he added. “We develop a very end-to-end, offline-online profile of what that individual looks like, without releasing the name, and we take that and match it against what unique visitors are doing online.” If the people online have that same kind of profile, IRI uses that and other matching variables to assign a score relating to the shopper’s “propensity to purchase.”

On the back-end, IRI and its partners conduct a “very traditional exposed versus non-exposed” ROI analysis that goes into the mix of evaluating the online campaign’s in-store impact, Tomei said.