So you've designed a brilliant search marketing campaign, and are tracking clicks, conversions, ROI and all of the other right metrics, and then... no sale. What happened? Your users may have purchased from a bricks and mortar merchant -- but how do you know for sure?

In today's SearchDay article, Search Online, Buy Offline: How to Tell? (http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3426621), guest writer Grant Crowell reports on a panel at SES San Jose that discussed techniques and tactics for correlating online search marketing campaigns with offline purchases. It's a surprisingly straightforward process, if you design your campaigns accordingly.

Comments welcome!

At a recent Users Forum for HitBox (WebSideStory) the head of predictive marketing for Daimler Chrysler outlined how his company used online traffic patterns and requests for info to actually determine the number of a particular style of car gets made.
In other words millions of dollars of manufacturing decisions are done through online activity passed to off line purchases and preorder fulfillments.
The information obviously is based on millions of monthly visitors and ongoing years of historical data.