Store Visits: Measuring Foot Traffic from AdWords – Rapid Immersion #12
Store Visits: Measuring Foot Traffic from AdWords – Rapid Immersion #12

Store Visits: Measuring Foot Traffic from AdWords – Rapid Immersion #12

Hi and welcome to Rapid Immersion, where we discuss questions and topic areas within your digital marketing ecosystem.

This week: measuring Store Visits from AdWords campaigns.

One of the challenges retailers face with AdWords management is measuring the amount of foot traffic from people who choose to visit and buy in-store.

In the online environment, measuring e commerce activity is usually something that’s possible in great detail. You can see the ads that are leading to conversions, transaction amounts, average order values and much more. But offline, it’s almost the exact opposite – Yes, there are workarounds – but generally speaking, the moment that someone decides to venture in-store and transact in-person (instead of online), campaign measurement becomes much more complex. And in many cases, getting a visitor in store is the primary goal of the retailer’s campaign, especially if we’re talking about larger ticket items.

So, to help solve the challenge of tying clicks on search ads to in store visits and sales, Google have released a conversion metric called ‘Store Visits’.

‘Store Visits’ works by examining AdWords ad interactions across multiple devices – desktop, tablet, mobile – then mixing it and matching this data with location with location signals, to provide an estimate of what percentage of users visited the store within 30 days of an ad click based on the sample set. Advertisers will be able to see Store Visits in their AdWords interface, tracked as a new conversion type at the campaign level.

To protect users privacy, the ‘Store Visits’ metric is based on anonymised data from large sample sets, and only becomes available when a user has Location History enabled on their device. Location history allows Google to show useful information based on where a person has been with the devices that they’re signed in to with their Google account. You are welcome to view your Location History here.

To wrap-up here, Store Visits are designed to be another piece of the puzzle advertisers can use to measure the influence and effectiveness of online efforts to offline actions. If you would like to use store visits in your campaigns, the best course of action is to chat with your agency or Google rep to see if your account is eligible. It is important to note that because this metric requires plenty of data, it is really designed for the larger retailers at this time, so that would be businesses with several locations who are receiving 15K+ clicks from AdWords each month.

Well, thank you very much for your time and all the best in your efforts for optimising online, for offline.

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