NinthDecimal announces ‘website to store’ offline attribution capability

The world of online-to-offline attribution continues to expand. Today, NinthDecimal announced “website-to-store attribution.” The capability will track visitors to websites who subsequently visited physical stores or business locations.

The promise of this approach is that marketers and brands will be able evaluate their sites (across platforms) on the basis of “real world KPIs” rather than simply search rankings, clicks and time on site. It provides another tool for marketers to help understand omnichannel audience behavior.

In testing out the new capability, NinthDecimal conducted a study with agency Ansira, across three industries (QSR, automotive and retail). The companies found that “the device a person uses to access a website may have a direct correlation to whether they visit a physical store.” Mobile devices, as one might expect, were responsible for driving more incremental foot traffic than the desktop or tablets. The simple takeaway is that mobile websites matter.

Another finding, which is more nuanced, argues that how someone gets to a site is correlated with whether they visit a store. The parties said that “website-to-store conversion rates were higher among customers who entered the websites by clicking a search result.” Conversions were even higher when it was a paid-search result.

Yet incremental visits (meaning new customers) were higher via direct and referral traffic, according to the study.

These are initial findings and should be further explored. But they offer new insights into consumer behavior along the path to purchase. And the idea of being able to compare how different online variables surrounding website visitation impact real-world behavior is pretty compelling.