A recent article in AdAge magazine cited the challenges of attribution when offline media such as radio motivates shoppers to begin to gather information about a product or service using a search engine.  Said AdAge,  "After a consumer's curiosity has been piqued by watching (or hearing) a broadcast branding ad, they head straight to the Internet to uncover more information." 

It is true that a growing percentage of consumer's will go online after they hear your ad on the radio but when it comes to determining what sent them to search, be careful that you don't erroneously assume that the shopper would have found you without your radio campaign to motivate them to take action in the first place.

"41% of Web users find brands through search rather than just typing a URL in their browser...People are using search engines as browsers", says Brian Wiener, president at agency 360i, in New York.  Can you see how this factoid has great potential to mislead you as you seek to justify the investment of your radio advertising campaign?  If people are using search engines as browsers (and I must confess that I do this all the time)  then when determining where a shopper came from, search engines will get the credit when it was actually the radio campaign that created the business. 

Don't make the mistake of making a search engine "bigger" in your mind than it really is.  Think of a search engine like the "world wide yellow pages". It is a catalog of services organized and digitally driven so you can find what you're looking for. Understand the dynamics of your media mix so you'll know what is really happening and then you can give advertising credit where credit is due.