The store visits metric is an extremely useful tool for AdWords marketers, and now Google has announced new features for it.
The new additions will allow advertisers to get more insight into data surrounding store visits and will give them the ability to view visits at a keyword or Ad Group level. Viewing visit breakdowns by day, week and month will also give details such as the busiest times for footfall on Black Friday or other major trading occasions.
Understanding
The updates were announced in a Google blogpost that said: “By reviewing data at this level, advertisers can understand which keywords or ad groups drive the most store visits. For example, a toy store may learn that certain dolls or action figures bring in the most visitors.”
Store visits in AdWords are a basic way for retailers to be able to measure offline ROI from online data. The information gained in this way can show which products being featured in ads are actually succeeding in driving visits to physical stores.
Google claims that advertisers are finding four times as many conversions overall and ten times as many on mobiles by analysing this feedback data and then including it in ad performance stats.
Effectiveness
The whole system works on the basis that consumers are logged into Google accounts and are using Gmail, Docs, Google+ and so on. As people tend to stay logged in for convenience, it means that Google can track a click on a search ad and subsequently check if the user later makes an in-store visit.
Google’s own mapping technology means it knows the locations of physical shop outlets and the geography of the interior of the store itself. This means that GPS location signals and Wi-Fi data can be used to work out if a customer has visited a store and even which part of the building they went to.
The data is anonymised and only transmitted by users who choose to turn the Location History feature on. Various surveys also help to check the data Google generates in this way.
