Get more out of your local and omni-channel marketing

Yesterday at SMX East in New York City, I shared new innovations to help local and omni-channel marketers drive more foot traffic to business locations. To help you succeed with these new innovations, we also updated our Best Practices guides with new recommendations to drive more offline sales with online ads, and to glean more actionable insights from your store visits data.

So how can you make your ads more useful for nearby shoppers? First, enhance them with location extensions — which are now available across Search, Display and YouTube — and point people to helpful information like your store hours and directions to your business. Or show them what’s in-stock at the nearest store using local inventory ads for your Shopping campaigns. As we announced yesterday, a new local ad for Display will also help you bring your traditional catalogs and circulars to life online, and spotlight in-store products and promotions in richer ways.

Next, it’s critical to get a holistic view of your conversions to measure the full impact of your ads across online and offline channels. Use store visits for eligible advertisers to understand how your digital campaigns drive in-store performance.

A recent study of over 140 advertisers globally showed that Google Search and Shopping ads drive a substantial number of incremental store visits across a wide range of verticals — these are visits that wouldn't have happened if a user hadn't engaged with a Google ad. They also influence more valuable purchase behavior once someone arrives at your store.

To give you better insight into omni-channel performance, impression-based store visits are coming soon for display advertisers so you can measure when consumers visit your store after seeing your ad, even if they don’t click through. New time lag, new vs. returning customers and demographic reporting will also help you understand where your store visits come from. Use these alongside distance and geographic reporting for store visits to make smarter decisions about location targeting and bidding around your stores.

Get more details on our latest innovations by watching the full keynote from SMX East or reading yesterday’s in-depth blog post. And don’t forget to check out our best practices on how to get more offline sales from your online ads.