Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

This article (an overview of a presentation at SES) addresses the issue of tracking sales from people who research a product online but buy it offline. He offers a few suggestions for tracking some of the sales that occur through that channel. I'm sure the percentage of purchases made offline after online research varies considerably for each industry and each company within an industry, but this is an intriguing concept, and one which seems to elude most online marketers.

I'm not sure you'll ever be able to track every single offline purchase that occurs after online research, but it makes sense to do everything possible to track those sales so you can know how effective your ad dollars have been.