One of the key benefits of digital marketing is the ability to track and measure performance through conversion tracking. A conversion is essentially a valuable action that a user takes on the website such as making a purchase, submitting a form, clicking on a phone number, you get the point. We at Threesides, are huge fans of conversion tracking and believe any digital marketing campaign should have conversion tracking set up before going live.
But what if you are a business such as a retail store or a restaurant, where visits to your physical location are important? How do you measure the impact of digital marketing on in-store traffic? Enter store visit conversions. Store visits is a conversion type in Google Ads that tells you if a user clicked on a Google ad and then later visited your physical store location within 30 days.
How does it work?
Image copyright: Google
Google uses a combination of various user signals machine learning, mapping technology, and survey quality to calculate store visits accurately. Google tracks users when they click on an ad ,whether it is a search, display, shopping or YouTube ad, and are logged into their Google account on their phone, tablet or desktop. Google then reviews the user’s phone location history through GPS and the store’s Google My Business location to estimate whether the user actually visited the store. The data is then collected and aggregated anonymously, before being validated as a Store Visit.
Concerned about user privacy?
Don’t worry. Google collects data securely without sharing any personal location information at an individual level and cannot be tied to an individual click or person in any way. All the data, collected from a large sample set of users who opt in, is aggregated and anonymised.
If you don’t want Google to track your location, you can turn your location history setting off on your phone any time.
Am I eligible?
Since the data is extrapolated, Google needs a large sample size before it can show any results and as a result, store visits are only available to a limited number of accounts. You need to have a verified Google My Business account linked to your Google Ads account, receive thousands of ad clicks and impressions and have sufficient store visits data on the backend.
For more information on the requirements, please visit the Store Visits support page.
What other store visits insights are available?
As mentioned, while the data is anonymous, insights such as which delivered a store visit, how many days it took for the user to visit the store from clicking on the ad, age and gender and even the postcode of the user’s location when they clicked the ad, can be reported.
According to a Comscore study, 73% of the total purchases made following a mobile search happened in a physical store, making these actionable insights highly valuable for businesses to make data-driven decisions and measure consumer journeys.
Google is also currently developing Store Visits in Google Analytics, which aim to provide estimates to how visits to the website influence visits to the physical store from different channels such as Google Organic, Facebook, Email and more.
Intrigued? Contact us to find out if and how your business can take advantage of this amazing use of data.
