Segment Your Shop Visit Conversions For Deeper Insight in Adwords
Shop Visit Conversions allows certain advertisers in Google Adwords to use conversion tracking to help you see how your ad clicks influence visits to your store. If footfall and visits to your physical locations (for example, Hotels, Shops, Restaurants etc.) is important to your business, then this is something that you should keep reading!
Google now gives selected advertisers access to Shop Visit Conversions (you can find out more about how to get access here), allowing you to gain unrivalled insight into how your Paid Search activity is impacting on footfall. This insight now includes everything from which keyword delivered a store visit, to how many days it took a user to visit your store from an ad click.
The holiday season is upon us, so it’s now more important than ever that you create a data driven strategy to beat the competition.
We’ll show you how to get the best out of your Shop Visit Conversion data by giving you some actionable insight to use on your own campaigns!
How do Shop Visit Conversions work?
Google say that…
Shop visit data is based on anonymous, aggregated statistics. AdWords creates modelled numbers by using current and past data on the number of people who click on your ads and later visit your shop.
Shop visit data can’t be tied to individual ad clicks or people. Google use industry best practices to ensure the privacy of individual users.
Effectively, they use the data that they can collect and then they extrapolate this out to the wider population. Because of this, users of the data tend to be sceptical of the conversion. However, the most important thing to remember here is not to focus on the actual number itself, but instead look at the data in trends – this will be more accurate than taking the actual number of shop visit conversions as gospel.
Getting the most insight from your Shop Visit Conversions
First step; find the data in Google Adwords
The first stage is to understand where to access the data. Google breaks this down for you here but effectively all you need to do is the following;
- Select your date range (best to look at a minimum of the last 7 days)
- Add in the ‘All Conversions’ column
- Go to ‘Segment’
- Segment by ‘Conversion Name’
- You’ll see a row for ‘Shop visits’
Simple! The tricky part is to gain as much insight as possible with this conversion metric.
Top Tip
You’ll get a lot more insight from your Shop Visit Conversions by segmenting a report within Adwords. The interface is currently limited to how much it can display.
Understand the ‘Days to Conversion’ to see how long since an ad click did it take a user to visit your store
Since the end of June, we’ve been able to access ‘Days to Conversion’ as a segment alongside your Store Visit conversion. For me, this is one of the best bits of insight you can get to truly understand how your account is working to drive users into your store.
This shows you how long it took a user (after an ad click) to visit your store. For example, a user could have clicked on an ad and then visited within the same day, 2-3 days later or more. How cool is that?
Credit: Google
Understand ‘where’ a user was when they clicked on an ad and then visited your store
Overlaying Shop Visit Conversions with Dimensions can give you a load of insight. By overlaying it with a Geographic report in your Dimensions tab, you’ll be able to see where a user was when they clicked your ad and then visited a store.
This level of insight can be invaluable to your location strategy and can even help feed into decisions made with other marketing channels.
Credit: Google
Look at the Distance to where a user was when they clicked an ad and visited your store
By looking at a Distance report in the Dimensions tab, you can look to see how far a user was away from your store when they clicked on an ad and then visited your store.
Again, this can be super valuable to your location strategy. Having this understanding can help you adapt your geo targeting to be hyper-local, ensuring that you are maximising the opportunities available to you within a certain radius of your store.
Top Tip
Try segmenting this option by Device to see how Mobile traffic increases the closer you get to your store.
Segment by Device to understand whether Mobile, Desktop or Tablet drives the most store visits for your business
Having an understanding of which device helps you to drive the most store visits is important to help you understand where you should be looking to focus your efforts. Most of us know that this will be largely driven by Mobile, but it could throw in some surprises!
The level of insight keeps getting better every quarter with Shop Visit Conversions and we expect this to continue over the next few years as digital marketers fight fiercely to demonstrate the impact of digital marketing on offline footfall.
How will you use it to help make smarter decisions for the holiday season?
LinkedIn - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/siondanielroberts
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