Understand the Omnichannel Customer Journey with AdWords Store Visit Data

The consumer path is constantly evolving, and over the last few years, consumers are increasingly starting their purchase process at the digital level before moving to physical stores. According to Google, 64 percent of in-store sales have at least one digital touch point. Therefore, evaluating the impact of your marketing efforts on in-store customer acquisition is essential to understanding and growing your business. If you are only tracking online behavior, then you are likely undervaluing certain campaigns or evaluating them as poor performing, even if they might actually be positively influencing in-store sales.

Your online campaigns are influencing consumers’ offline activities, but how do you successfully track it? AdWords Store Visit Conversions measurement gets us one step closer, allowing advertisers to tie value from online efforts to what happens offline.

A few adjustments to your AdWords account can help drive more foot traffic, and purchases, to your brick and mortar locations.

How it Works

AdWords Store Visit Conversions are only available to certain advertisers based on a list of requirements (full list of requirements found here). In short, you must:

• Have multiple physical store locations in an eligible country
• Receive thousands of ad clicks and many store visits every month, based on Google’s measurements
• Link a Google My Business account to your AdWords account
• Enable location extensions

The AdWords Store Visit Conversions data is not tied to individual clicks or people. Instead, it is based on an estimation from anonymous aggregated data that Google has created by using current and past data on the number of people who have engaged with your ads and later visited your store. This more basic level of in-store sales measurement will only report on the estimated in-store visits impact of your AdWords campaigns without any back-end sales integration on your part.

If you meet the requirements, you can contact your AdWords representative to begin seeing store visit conversions in the conversions tab within your AdWords account.

From there, you can add “store visits” as its own custom column to see the number of store visits by campaign, segment or ad group.

Strategies for How to Use AdWords Store Visit Conversions

There are several ways that you can leverage this data to better understand the online to offline trend and take actionable steps to value omnichannel interactions. Here are our top recommendations:

• • Include offline store visits when calculating KPIs for your online campaigns: It is important to understand the full return from your online ads by accounting for the additional conversions that can happen offline through store visits. Apply an average order value to each store visit to calculate the value of offline sales driven by your online ads.
  • Take advantage of location extensions: Increase the likelihood of an in-store visit through location extensions that provide searchers with information about your business, like store hours, directions, or your phone number.
  • Flaunt local inventory: Create campaigns specific to targeting in-store visitors through Google shopping tools such as Local Inventory Ads or Store Pick Up features
  • Identify campaigns that drive more offline value and optimize them differently: You may have specific campaigns or product categories that are more effective at bringing people into a store. Segment these campaigns and test more localized or store-specific ad copy and location targeting to encourage people to convert in store.
  • Bid differently: Evaluate and bid differently on keywords or ad groups that drive additional value offline, instead of just evaluating them on online performance
  • Google Radius Targeting: Create “store-visit” campaigns that target all users within a certain radius of your store location to ensure that you show in a strong position for these highly qualified searches
  • Evaluate mobile separately: Segment in-store visits performance on mobile separately from other devices. Google reports 50% faster growth for local searches on mobile devices compared to all mobile searches, meaning that local searches are becoming a large chunk of your overall mobile traffic.

The modern consumer is an omni-channel shopper, which means they use a variety of channels throughout their shopping journey before ultimately converting. Understanding the relationship between the many online and offline channels today’s shoppers are engaging with has always been difficult. AdWords in-store visits allow you to make more measurable and informed decisions about the digital influence on your physical stores, ultimately allowing you to improve your ad targeting and drive more revenue overall.