Offline Sales, Online Ads, Offline Tracking

As Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft ramp up the battle for local search dollars, retailers new to the online world need to track the effectiveness of their online advertising campaigns. Believe it or not, there are thousands of businesses that do not have websites. They have been content to stick with yellow pages, print media, and radio spots to reach the local audience. That local audience has become more of a consumer of the Internet than ever before, though. Instead of subscribing to a newspaper, they visit the newspaper's website. Instead of turning to the yellow pages to find a business, many people will enter a business category and city into a search engine to see what may be nearby. The major search engine and advertising players want to help businesses tap that web-savvy audience. A paid search campaign can direct the visitor to a landing page, but if the inventory from the business is not available online, the visitor needs to make a brick-and-mortar visit to complete the sale. Without some way to track that sale, it will be impossible to tell if a customer at the register is actually a converted online prospect. Internet marketing blogger Shimon Sandler