When you track your marketing campaign effectiveness, do you track each marketing channel individually? When a sale closes, do you attribute the entire sale to one marketing channel? How do you accurately calculate the return of your marketing budget that was spent on impression? How about those offline marketing channels that aren’t as easily trackable? On top of it, are all of your channel partners working with each other to boost the ROI of your overall campaign?

Well, what if your channel partner covers online, retail, print and TV? Is it Google? Not quite, but almost… The Hallmark Channel has partnered with Nielsen to track its sales and coverage across its retail stores, Web sites, The Hallmark Channel, and the Hallmark Magazine. Imagine that you can measure how much influence your print, TV and online marketing have on each sale. Or that you can track the optimal timing and frequency of impressions that will lead to a sale. This partnership is a small step in the right direction to further integrate tracking of both online and offline marketing. It’s especially important for TV content providers because marketers are shifting more of their ad spend to online. "Eyeballing" by itself is losing its stronghold and needs to be combined with actionable online tracking.

However, there are still a plethora of content providers with which many SMBs will find it overwhelming to have a partnership. Hence, you need an aggregator who can step in to pull the data of TV viewing, retail store purchases, online purchases, mobile viewing, print, radio, etc., and piece it all together. While Google seems to be well on its way to cover more of these channels with radio and TV ads, they did announce last week that they'll no longer be selling Google Print Ads. So, until a company comes along that can do it all, tracking marketing effectiveness in both online and offline worlds will continue to be fragmented and daunting for many businesses.

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