Online retail transactions are on the rise, but the traditional brick-and-mortar stores still far outstrip them with a dominating 90 percent of the retail revenues going through their physical cash registers. Even so, some of the traditional stores are taking cues from their online counterparts as they look for attribution numbers which some believe will lead to a demand for cost-per-visit models, according to Marketing Land.
Online retail represents about $15 billion per year, 21 percent of the total advertising revenues online, according to a 2016 IAB report. Financial services and auto shopping run in second and third place at 13 and 12 percent, respectively.
Even with those numbers, over 90 percent of all consumer retail dollars are spent inside a physical store. A number of millennials shop online, but a number of the Gen-Z population prefer browsing the malls and stores in real-time. According to an IBM study this year, about 61 percent of them prefer the brick-and-mortar experience most of the time with 22 percent using a web-browser and 13 percent using apps. That smallest, 4 percent, pay by phone.
As mobile information and local searches have begun rising the idea of CPV models is becoming a not so unlikely idea as it was once deemed. Recently, online metrics have been introduced by a few companies like Placed, xAd, and Blis.
The use of online-to-offline attribution numbers will likely become an important part of the advertising game as marketers begin seeing the visitations gleaned from mobile-users. Marketers will be able to use reliable digital numbers to see how effectual their online ad campaigns really are in real-world shopping.
