Frazier Miller, the General Manager of Yahoo!Local, talked about ROBO - which stands for Research Online, Buy Offline - in his keynote presentation at the SMX Local Mobile Conference in San Francisco last week. I don’t think Miller (correct me if I’m wrong, please) coined the term, but I’ll certainly give him credit for quite possibly making it the new mantra for those who promote brick and mortar businesses online.

According to Forrester Research, as much as $500,000,000 in offline spending was influenced by the internet in 2007. Comscore notes that 89% of buyers do research online before making their purchase offline. This is not news. Take a look at this article on offline spending from 8 years ago and another from ClickZ from 4 years ago.

The tracking of website conversions for Local Search has always been difficult and all online marketers know that their efforts result in many, many more leads, phone calls and sales than they are given credit for. How to track these conversions was a hot topic at the conference and ROBO gave us all a shared perspective through which to talk about it. Coupons, sophisticated call tracking and tracking URLs give us powerful tools with which to measure offline conversions, but they still leave a huge gap in the numbers.

Small businesses, in particular, who often rely almost exclusively on Yellow Pages advertising, seem to be the hardest to convince of the value of online marketing. This is incredibly ironic when you consider the lack of that advertising channel’s tracking capabilities.

It’s estimated that 50% of businesses have yet to get a website up and running. This most definitely gives the advantage to their competitors that do.