Gustaf Stenlund
Gustaf Stenlund
May 11, 2017

 

 
Many advertisers are still in the dark of how to use native content to drive offline sales. In this post we’ve put forward a foolproof framework for brands looking for indicators of purchase intent.
 
The ability to measure purchase intent on content, and to prove that consumers are taking desired actions (i.e. most often a purchase or conversion), is a brand’s ultimate proof point. Brands need to start identifying purchasing behavior, from online touch-points to offline sales, and associate which steps of the buyer journey that drives real, tangible value…
 
…If the advertiser doesn’t know which steps the consumer took before positively engaging with their brand, i.e. bought their products, they won’t be able to facilitate that behavior in the future.
 
Read on to learn the different methods brands can use to measure purchase intent on their content.
 
Talk to a Nudge account manager to start measuring purchase intent on your customer journeys.
 

The Three Situations Which Cover Most Use Cases

 
There are a string of challenges for offline brands looking to understand their consumers’ buyer journeys. These are the most common situations we’ve come across in the market.
 
Situation 1: You’re selling a product that can only be bought in a supermarket, and consumers are highly unlikely to buy it online.
 
Situation 2. Your product is purchased in so many places that it’s going to be hard to collect data for all of those touch points.
 
Situation 3. You’re unable to get access to purchase data.
 
The common thread here is that the brand has incorporated content as part of their marketing mix, and believe it plays a vital part in order to persuade consumers.
 

Nudge Solutions to Measuring Purchase Intent

Nudge solutions to measuring purchase intent for brands in offline environments
 
If you sit in any of these situations, you need to use a proxy that indicates purchase intent/future purchase to establish a benchmark. By doing so, it lets you see how your content is driving business outcomes.
 
Nudge helps offline brands measure purchase intent through the following solutions:
 
Solution 1: Measuring purchase intent

Nudge has conversion pixels which can easily be placed on landing pages (we can pixel any online order) and relevant product pages in order to demonstrate how the content is driving purchase intent.
 
Examples of purchase intent events:

  • Visits to a product page
  • Visits to a store locator

 
Nudge’s purchase intent window is 60-90 days, meaning it allows you to see a bigger view of the impact of your campaign.
 
In essence, this provides a proxy for success, and also acts as a benchmarking point for each partner, seeing their varying levels of purchase intent.
 
Solution 2: Purchase data sync

If a brand has purchase data from a third party data source, Nudge can send through raw logs of our data looking at any given IP address, device and cookie, to match to the purchase data.
 
This enables the brand to see if customers bought items in store that read the content.
 
All we need to know is how/what they’re doing to give them the right data.
 
Solution 3: Interaction/clicks on content

If you’re unable to go with the two aforementioned solutions, you’ll need to look at behavioural proxies, such as the ratio between interaction and clicks.
 
Did the brand feature any call to actions in the content?
 
If so, Nudge is able to quantify this and compare it against the norms; normally we’d anticipate between 1-3% of people reading the content would take some form of next step.
 
Solution 4: Compare against benchmarks

Benchmarks are the best way to understand comparative value against other campaigns until industry-specific norms are established. With Nudge you can benchmark your campaigns using normalized metrics built for purpose as native requires a blend of content, social and advertising KPIs, delivered quickly. By knowing if a campaign is achieving at or above benchmarks, it gives advertisers a yardstick to measure and optimize against.
 
Examples of useful metrics you can benchmark with Nudge:

  • Scroll – Total impressions of your campaign.
  • Engagement – Amount of people who shared it and amount of those who read it.
  • Attention minutes – Time that consumers are actively consuming the content.

 

Pro’s and Con’s to the Different Solutions

 
Measuring purchase intent:

  • Pro’s: Objective data-driven approach, easier to use Nudge Benchmarks, can optimize in real-time, the ability to get view-through attribution.
  • Con’s: The brand is required to place a pixel on their site.

 
Purchase data sync:

  • Pro’s: Measuring with real purchase data, often the clients data (source of proof for them).
  • Con’s: Match rate can be low for a number of reasons, could be more expensive, client might not be able to get access.

 
Interaction/clicks:

  • Pro’s: Don’t have to involve the brand.
  • Con’s: Can only pick up instant purchase intent.

 
Compare against benchmarks:

  • Pro’s: No additional steps to enable, Nudge has benchmarks for every category, i.e. you get granular data.
  • Con’s: You can’t see the behaviour beyond the content.

 

Summary

The digital landscape continues to grow more rapidly each year. Brands can no longer afford not to adopt these methods, as they’ll otherwise see their offline and online competitors surpass them.
 
By measuring and associating specific events with a set of values across the digital ecosystem and in turn tie those into offline behaviors/conversion points, means that brands will have the tools to learn exactly what they should be optimizing towards in order to steer their businesses in the right direction, both strategically and from a budget perspective, i.e what the impact is on your most important business objectives.
 
Talk to your Nudge account manager today, to see this in action in your digital landscape.
 
 


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