• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 19, 2016

Google has developed technology that allows it to measure the impact of online video for offline sales. The first round of tests focuses on the consumer packaged goods (CPGs) industry for which more than 90% of sales happen offline. The task made possible through an integration with the Oracle Data Cloud.

DLX ROI, a Datalogix solution now owned by Oracle, enables measurement of YouTube's media. It can analyze the incremental lift in offline sales from online video views. On Tuesday the company announced the availability of the technology and results of studies from PepsiCo's Gatorade and Doritos brands and Mars-owned Pedigree pet chow that took place in the U.S. using YouTube TrueView ads.

Seventy-eight percent of TrueView campaigns studied on YouTube showed an increase in offline sales, with 61% driving a statistically significant lift in sales of the advertised brand, according to Google.

Building the integration wasn't easy. It meant developing a secure way to exchange the data between YouTube and Oracle's Datalogix measurement technology. The outcome creates a deal similar to Oracle's agreement with Facebook that measures the influence of digital ad views on in-store sales.

YouTube analysts studied a range of CPG video campaigns running TrueView ads across food, health and beauty, beverage and homecare. No personal data is exchanged between the companies.

Gatorade’s We Love Sweat campaign earned $13.50 sales in return on advertising spend (ROAS) for every dollar spent on TrueView, for example. The campaign delivered 16% lift in sales among new buyers that had seen the video vs. new buyers that had not, according to Oracle Data Cloud. This compares with a typical lift in metric that hovers around 2.5%.

Doritos, another PepsiCo company, also saw sales success with their campaign. Their 30-second video drove higher lift in sales among exposed households than a 15-second version, but they saw particular targeting techniques such as topic targeting and remarketing that drove greater sales lift compared with a demographic target.

Laurent Larguinat, global director of Mars Consumer and Market Insights, told YouTube that a "video with strong upfront branding drove nearly seven-times greater sales lift."