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Last Updated: May 26, 2022

How can you optimize your Google Ads campaigns for conversions, if the majority or all of your conversions are happening offline, in your physical shops/stores?

According to Google, 95% of retail sales still happen in physical stores and not online.

Many people use the internet to research a particular product but often visit a physical store to make a purchase. As a result, businesses that advertise online but sell in physical stores have a hard time understanding how their online ads and websites are driving offline sales.

This creates online-offline attribution issues.

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In order to fix such attribution issues, you need to track the number of store visits generated by your Google Ads campaigns:

If you use Google Ads then you can use its shop/store visit conversion tracking feature to measure the impact of clicks on your location-based Google Ads search ads, in terms of bringing prospective customers to your physical store.

In other words, through store visit conversion tracking you can determine the number of people who visited your physical store or location after clicking on your Google Ads.

A store visit conversion is recorded when a user visits your physical store after clicking on one of your Google Ads location-based ads (within 30 days).

Google takes ad clicks on all devices (desktop, tablet, smartphone, etc.) into account while calculating store visits.

Through the store visit metric, you can determine the Google Ads campaigns, ad groups, and keywords that sent prospective customers to your physical store in the last 30 days, after clicking on one of your location-based search ads.

You can then choose to bid on these campaigns, ad groups and keywords more aggressively in order to increase ‘in-store traffic’.

The store visits data is collected and aggregated anonymously by Google so you cannot associate an individual ad click or store visit to a particular person.

The store visit conversion tracking is available only to selected advertisers (mostly large retailers) at present.

Contact your account manager to determine whether you, as a Google Ads advertiser, qualify for store visit conversion tracking and whether this tracking is available in your physical location.

If you qualify for store visit conversion tracking, then follow the steps below to track store visits in your Google Ads reports:

Step 1: Sign in to your Google Ads account and then navigate to ‘Tools’> ‘Conversions’:

Step 2: Create a new conversion of type ‘store visits’:

Step 3: Navigate to the ‘campaigns’ tab and click on ‘columns’, then ‘modify columns’:

Step 4: Click on the ‘custom columns’ link.

Step 5: Name your new column ‘store visits’ and then select the ‘store visits’ conversion name, as shown below:

Step 6: Click on the apply button:

You can now see the ‘store visits’ data in your Google Ads reports:

Note: Store visit conversion tracking will only tell you how many people interacted with your Google Ads and then entered your physical store. It does not give you an insight into how many of these people actually ended up making a purchase in your physical store. This lack of information on in-store transactions is the major drawback of store visit conversion tracking in Google Ads.

As such, a traditional MMM model is not suitable for carrying out digital marketing mix modelling aka attribution modelling.

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• Learn to implement attribution modelling in your organisation
• Understand the customer purchase journey across devices
• Determine the most effective marketing channels for investment

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