Twitter announced on Thursday a partnership with Datalogix, a marketing company that measures the impact of online advertisements, to develop an “offline sales impact” program. The new program intends to help quantify the effect of promoted and organic (non-advertising) tweets on offline sales for consumer packaged goods (CPG) businesses in the U.S. Twitter plans to offer this program to more verticals and outside the U.S. in the future.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 94 percent of retail activity still occurs offline. This is a challenge when attempting to determine the effect of online advertising offline.

Datalogix ran studies for 35 brands, across multiple CPG categories, including beverages, food, wellness, household products and alcohol, to measure the effect of organic and paid Twitter activity on offline sales, reports Twitter. The studies found three areas where tweets affected sales.

Users that engaged with a product’s Promoted Tweets bought more of that product than a statistically identical control group, with a 12 percent growth in average sales. The results also showed an average two percent sales increase among users that simply saw the Promoted Tweets without engagement.

Twitter users that viewed a product’s organic tweets bought more of the product than those who did not view the tweet, with an average eight percent sales increase. The growth was three times larger than users who viewed five or more organic tweets over the study time period.

Promoted Tweets add to sales impact over organic tweets. Followers of a brand or product that viewed Promoted Tweets bought 29 percent more those who viewed organic tweets only.

Datalogix has emphasized that user data privacy will be maintained and all data will remain anonymous and will not reveal an individual’s purchases. Users can opt out of Datalogix’s measurement studies at anytime.

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Nielsen Study Finds Links Between TV Viewing and Twitter, ETCentric, 8/7/13