Google announced something really big, which I am surprised the search marketing community isn't talking about more. They launched "Store Visits," a new estimate added to your estimated total conversions within your AdWords campaign that aims on bridging your online ads to physical in-store conversion sales.
Google said, ff visits to your physical locations - like hotels, auto dealerships, restaurants, and retail stores - are important to your business, you can use conversion tracking to help you see how your ad clicks influence store visits.
Google looks at the location of user based on their location history pulled from their mobile devices. It then takes this "aggregated, anonymized data from a sample set of users" and extrapolates an estimate of the conversions you would see in your store. It will then add these metrics to your estimate total conversion data in your AdWords account.
The requirements include:
- Have a Google My Business account linked to your AdWords account
- Set up location extensions in your Google My Business account
- Have multiple physical store locations in the US
- Receive a large number of both ad clicks and store visits
Here is more on how to set it up.
How accurate is it? That is hard to say but it does give you one more conversion data point to play with.
Forum discussion at Google+.
