Research Online, Purchase Offline: Salesforce Commerce Cloud & ROPO

Wolfgang Digital’s annual KPI report of online marketing has a few explosive details which are important for those of us who focus on Salesforce Commerce Cloud to understand.

One of the most significant findings is regarding their ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline) functionality within Adwords. This is a relatively new metric that Google is supporting that measures, well, people who researched a product online and were exposed to ads while doing so, which was mapped to their online commerce. (Wolfgang’s report calls it “Research Online, Purchase-in-Store” but the “ROPO” label is more common.)

Wolfgang found that companies had 168% more in-store revenue from sales from people who had researched it online, compared to people who had researched the site and then bought it online.

While this is interesting overall, it is especially interesting from the eyes of SF Commerce Cloud. Commerce Cloud is very often used by companies with physical as well as online stores — and that’s why it can allow cartridges to integrate online and offline sales in creative and powerful ways. But ecommerce department managers know that their sales leak into offline, but have never been able to quantitatively justify or defend it. But now they can! As directors of ecommerce fight for their budget, now they can more confidently argue that, well, it’s entirely likely that 1.7x more sales come from people who buy products in-store, but previously were exposed to them online.

There is a second finding that’s noteworthy, which is this: 2020 is the first year in which ecommerce from mobile devices will likely be higher than that from desktops/laptops. We’ve been predicting this for a long time, and it is finally here:

From the perspective of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, this is important evidence that SFRA (the latest version of SF Commerce Cloud, which is effectively mobile first) is an essential upgrade. If more than half of your customers are coming from mobile devices, then the excuses not to use a mobile-first platform are quickly vanishing.

Less significantly, the report also contains less surprising results. Voice search still hasn’t caught on (yes, we know: does anyone actually use that other than my aging aunt?). Pages are taking longer to load across the web, now averaging 5.3 seconds — yes, with so much tracking code being grafted onto every site, this is also expected. But these don’t affect SF Commerce Cloud that much.

The conclusion is conclusive: the time to ramp up your online presence, particularly if you have physical stores and an ecommerce presence is, well, yesterday.

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud development & strategy teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.