From Search To Store: Google Shows You Ads And Keywords Driving Offline Visits

Google released data earlier today on foot traffic patterns during the holiday shopping season. The data were collected from anonymous mobile users with location history enabled. These capabilities are part of Google’s broader Estimated Total Conversions effort to connect digital advertising with store visits. It matters because local commerce is more than 10X larger than […]

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Google released data earlier today on foot traffic patterns during the holiday shopping season. The data were collected from anonymous mobile users with location history enabled.

These capabilities are part of Google’s broader Estimated Total Conversions effort to connect digital advertising with store visits. It matters because local commerce is more than 10X larger than e-commerce. Lack of visibility on what is helping generate offline visits means lack of clarity on ROI.

To help remedy that, Google announced that you can see how specific keywords or ad groups are impacting physical store visits — by day, week and month:

Starting today, advertisers can get a more detailed view of offline measurement with the ability to breakout store visits at a keyword or ad group level, and the ability to view visits by day, week, or month to better inform bidding and campaign strategy. 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. With this insight, that toy store might invest in search terms that drive both online and offline sales, and display those products at the front of their store. As a reminder, store visits are based on anonymous and aggregated statistics and are shared in a privacy-safe way.

The value of this kind of data is self-evident. It should be something of a revelation to search marketers to be able to see which keywords or ad groups are actually impacting in-store foot traffic. And it should impact bidding fairly dramatically.


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About the author

Greg Sterling
Contributor
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.

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