Customers will also have access to analytics, the ability to create performance models based on whether a sale occurred online or offline, and to do offline sales measurement, according to Marco Botticelli, head of product for Performance Horizon.
The companies say the technical integration will help their customers better understand how their partners' marketing activity contributes to offline sales, improving sales measurement, optimization efforts, and allowing them to reward digital partners responsible for offline sales.
Performance Horizon’s business focuses on partner marketing that involves non-standard ad units; non-traditional partnerships such as meta-search channels for the travel and retail sectors; partner management; sales measurement; analytics; and the creation of optimization models. LiveRamp’s business connects digital marketing platforms and data providers, and it enables customer data to be shared across disparate systems.
“Brands want to tailor conversations around better customer experiences and journeys, whether their [sales] conversions are happening offline or online. Our software platform is integrated into LiveRamp, and we can import offline sales data for any LiveRamp client,” Botticelli said.
The ability to know whether a sale happened online or offline and how marketing and targeting contributed to it is important for creating business models and helps with hyper-local targeting. So-called performance advertisers in the entertainment, retail, and travel sectors, for example, have typically found it hard to measure marketing effectiveness and the impact of targeting capabilities vis-à-vis offline sales. The companies’ partnership is designed to address this issue.