You spend a lot of money on your online marketing, but if you are a brick-and-mortar store, it’s hard to know if these efforts are really paying off. That is, it used to be. Now, thanks to Google AdWords, you can get a clear picture of how the money you are spending in online advertising translates to in-store purchases.
Why Store Visit Insights Matters
You can easily measure how many new visitors your website gets in a day, and you can also calculate how many purchases are made in your store, but if you don’t understand how much the two are connected, you could be wasting away your advertising budget in all the wrong places. Just because 95% of purchases take place in stores, that doesn’t mean that’s where you should be spending 95% of your budget.
It’s no secret that people love their smartphones, and it’s also not a mystery that they are searching for you before they even step a foot inside your location. In fact, 32% of today’s shoppers have said that they found a retail location because of a location-based search ad. Could you imagine losing 32% of your business merely because you didn’t show up on the Google results page when the people nearby you entered your keywords in the search bar? Or better yet, envision how great it would be to increase your sales by 32% by simply including these ads in your marketing repertoire.
How Store Visit Data Is Configured
Clearly, you need to know how your online efforts lead to in-store visits for measuring ROI, but how exactly is this data configured? It’s not like your customers go online and click a button that says, “Yes! I visited this store in person!” (Although that would be handy.) Since it’s not that simple, Google AdWords has come up with a tool they call Estimated Total Conversions, or ETC. It’s a relatively new tool that gives you an overall view of how your search advertising is resulting in sales, both online and in-store. They do this by collecting anonymous data from the users who have their location settings enabled on their phones. This information is then averaged and expanded to give you an estimate that provides a complete picture.
Ways Search Ads Can Increase Store Visits
Once you realize just how many people are finding you online before actually visiting your store, you will be able to improve their online experience to further boost your conversion rates. For example:
- It has been shown that 70% of shoppers that use search ads believe it’s important that companies include location information in them. An address is one thing, but PetSmart took it to another level. They amped up their ads to include not only their location, but also a map and directions to the store closest to the searcher—and all the consumer had to do was type a pet product into Google. And guess what? As much as 18% of their ad clicks resulted in a visit to the store.
- In addition to location, 74% of consumers want to know that the product they are looking for is in stock, because their time is valuable and they don’t want to waste it. Instead of making their customers either call the store or visit their website to see inventory levels, Office Depot decided to include this information directly in their search ads. So if you search for a certain type of printer ink, you will instantly be shown the closest Office Depot that has that ink in stock—no time wasted.
When you are a brick-and-mortar store, it’s not enough to track your online activity. You also need to be acutely aware of how this activity is leading to in-store sales. With this important data in your hand, you will be able to tweak your online efforts to give your customers a phone-to-store experience that will make everybody happy.
At Zero Gravity Marketing, we are experts in local marketing, SEO, and Google AdWords, and we would love to help you combine them all for never-before-seen results.
