To celebrate 10 years of Columbus Web Analytics Wednesdays we realized there could be no better speaker than CBUSDAW legend Monish Datta. Sure, Monish might now be the Monetization Product Marketing Team Manager at Facebook, but we knew him way back when — and he hasn’t forgotten his Ohio roots. Managing to escape from New York just ahead of yet another late season snowstorm on the east coast, Monish stopped by to drop a whole bunch of knowledge about how Facebook is dealing with offline measurements such as store visits and offline conversions.

Despite our feelings that online commerce is taking over everything, online retail only accounts currently for about 10% of all transactions! This is why understanding what happens in “the real world” and bringing that gap between offline and online activity is so important. This is tricky stuff — not because there is any one piece of the technology puzzle that is so complex, but because there so many different data sources, touch points, and privacy concerns.

An engaged crowd asked some tough questions about how this type of measurement works and Monish was ready with answers. As a group many of us had experience working with Facebook Ads of multiple types, but very few had ventured into this area of offline activity. Despite threats to pivot to talking about himself — there were many answers to be had, and only a couple of “we can’t disclose that”s.

Ultimately, Monish described this sort of real-world activity as an “offline pixel” where, with the right data integrations, we can start to think about offline activity in some of the same ways we think about online activities — as those two different arenas continue to overlap more and more.

We hope to see everyone next time at Rev1 in April when Rob Barto from Search Discovery will talk about holiday paid search planning! It’ll be Christmas in April, with hopefully some less Christmas-like temperatures.