Anyone involved in local SEO can rattle off a number of well-researched statistics straight off the top of their head. The most important of those being: “50% of local searches lead to in-store visits within one day.” Local search is much more in-the-moment, and it’s obviously easier to get to a brick-and-mortar location that’s right down the road.
But organic search, despite its position as a vital part of SEO, is not alone on the search engine results page. Google AdWords, the paid advertising counterpart to organic search, also has helped drive store visits, and in an effort to quantify the effect of advertising on this platform, Google introduced store visits tracking back in 2014. The results were quite a shock. Why? They were over 1 billion!
What is Store Visits tracking?
With AdWords, what wasn’t taken into account in the past was how often the paid ads resulted in store visits, which is in itself a type of conversion. So in December 2014, Google introduced a metric called Store Visits, to help quantify the online-to-offline impact.
Over 1 billion visits!
Since 2014, Google has measured more than 1 billion store visits globally as a result of Google AdWords. One study done by Nissan in the UK showed that 6% of mobile ad clicks lead to a visit to the dealership. Not too shabby when you consider the cost of a mobile ad compared to the profit of a selling a new car!
This has helped drive home the importance of paid ads, which on the surface didn’t seem to have the same conversions as organic. Retailers saw their conversions increased tenfold when they accounted for store visits.
What this means for SEO
If anything, this proves that SEO is a complicated matter that involves more than just tailoring a campaign toward organic search. Do you want to measure sales online, store visits, visibility, or social media shares? How about all of them? The importance of local SEO, mobile ads, Google AdWords, and metric tracking cannot be understated, and it takes a trained set of eyes to really understand the impact.
Store Visits is a metric that can help businesses and their SEO professionals quantify the effectiveness of their AdWords campaign. When they are factored in, it shows that conversions from paid ads are much higher than previously thought.
