New Google Metric Reveals Which Products Drive Store Visits

Now, with the help of a new metric called "store visit measurement," advertisers in the U.S. can decide which products to include in their search listings.

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Date published
December 18, 2014 Categories

As the holiday season fast approaches, Google is looking to provide AdWords advertisers with better insight into what products drive consumers to their stores.

The tech giant has added a new metric called “store visit measurement” to its Estimated Total Conversions (ETC) tool to give AdWords users a holistic view of how consumers are engaging with their businesses.

The “store visit” metric for a brand is based on the company’s collective search ads on Google across different devices, including product listing ads (PLA), local inventory ads, and other types of search ads. Advertisers can use insights from store visit data to decide which products are driving consumers to visit their stores.

In an example provided by Google that focuses on Office Depot, the office supply company can leverage the store visit data to see if the HP printer drives consumers to one of its stores, and further decide if it should include the HP printer in local inventory ads. In doing so, Office Depot can understand the impact of its search ads, and better allocate its advertising budget.

Data is the essence of this new feature. According to Google, the new metric has been designed to keep data private and secure. “We never provide anyone’s actual location to advertisers. Instead, store visits are estimates based on aggregated, anonymized data from a sample set of users that have turned on Location History,” Google said in a statement.

A Google representative tells Search Engine Watch that the “store visit measurement” is still in its early days, as the new feature will just be rolling out in the U.S. in the coming weeks. But Google will work with more marketers in the new year to figure out how to better apply this metric.

Google declined to disclose whether the “store visit” metric will become available for advertisers outside the U.S. in the future.

Homepage image via Shutterstock.

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