ROPO for Retail

A major retail brand in Eastern Europe needed to understand how website visits affect offline purchases in order to better optimize their marketing budget. With 85% of purchases made in retail stores and only 15% online, it was important to understand how digital marketing activities affect offline purchases.

The retail brand tasked ROPO for Retail to connect online website visits to offline in-store purchases.

Since up to a million people a day visit the site and it uses the standard version of Google Analytics, it was necessary to first set up streaming of unsampled and raw data to the cloud environment. GTM Server-Side was installed on the site to transmit session hits with user metadata to Google Cloud Platform. As CRM data was necessary, Extremum Digital set up batch data downloads to Google Cloud Platform as well.

Since the discount card contains a unique customer ID, it was chosen as the primary key for combining online with offline data. This identifier was also assigned to the user during authorization on the site, and was used to retrospectively identify shoppers who are not logged in on the website but have made purchases in the past.

Once ROPO for Retail identified ‘research online, purchase offline’ users, an automated report was created to track the results of digital marketing channels for offline purchases.

ROPO for Retail was able to successfully connect online and offline data, and created an automatic report that provides strategic insight on the company's marketing activities. It was found that of all offline purchases, 25% had previously done online research on the website.

This insight led to significant budget reallocations to improve overall marketing performance. Through this work, the retail brand can better understand customer journeys and optimize digital campaigns toward offline purchases.