Consumers are increasingly turning to their smartphones to research and explore the physical world around them. In fact, “near me” searches on mobile have grown 3x in the past two years.1 And 3 in 4 people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a related business within 24 hours.2 For marketers, this means it’s more important than ever to build experiences that surface relevant local information as easily as possible, and then measure the impact to your business.
Last month at Google Marketing Live, we announced Local campaigns, a new dedicated campaign type for marketers with offline goals who want to focus on bringing more customers into brick-and-mortar locations. Provide a few simple inputs—like your business locations, budget and ad creative—and we automatically optimize your ads across Google properties and networks to help you drive more store visits.
We now have more innovations coming soon to help you manage your local ads, and then measure the offline performance of your media across Google and other marketing channels.
Find a Google My Business account and easily activate local ads
To create local ad formats using location extensions, the first step is linking your Google My Business account to your Google Ads account. This allows us to show consumers relevant information from your business listings, such as your address, phone number, business hours and more.
To simplify the process of finding the right Google My Business account to link to, we’re introducing a tool that will automatically surface relevant accounts for you using matching signals like your geographic coverage and website domain.
Choose a Google My Business account with the most verified locations or the one with locations that best match your business and campaign objectives. Once the owner of that account approves, you’ll be ready to add location extensions to your Search, Display and YouTube ads.
Introducing store visits measurement in Google Analytics
When you’re investing in marketing solutions like Google Ads, it’s critical to understand the impact to your business in order to make more informed decisions about your budgets, creatives, bid strategies and more. We launched store visits in Google Ads over three years ago to help advertisers understand how their campaigns influence in-store traffic. Since then, we’ve measured over 10 billion visits across verticals like retail, auto, restaurants, and more.
Store visits in Google Ads has long focused on connecting Google ad impressions and clicks to visits. We’re now introducing Store Visits in Google Analytics so you can measure offline results from more of your marketing efforts that bring customers to your website and then to your store. Please speak to your account representative if you're interested in joining the beta.
Store visits in Google Ads and Google Analytics are estimates based on data from users that have turned on Location History. Only aggregated and anonymized data is reported to advertisers, and they aren’t able to see any store visits from individual website visits, ad clicks, viewable impressions, or people. Google uses industry best practices to ensure the privacy of individual users.
Denny’s reaches a new generation of diners with local ads solutions
Denny’s, a global restaurant chain, is one example of an advertiser using Google’s local products to bring more people into its diner locations. Customers are often searching for terms like “pancakes near me” or “best burgers nearby” on mobile. Denny’s shares how its shift from traditional media to Google Ads has uncovered new insights and helped them win more of these customers:
How Denny's is serving a new generation of diners with digital
| “You can have confidence, not only in serving that right message to the right consumer - but that digital marketing translates to in-store traffic. Ultimately, it brings the customer to the table.” - Luis Martinez, Digital, Media, and Hispanic Marketing at Denny's |
We look forward to helping you continue to build great online to offline experiences for your customers.
1. Internal Google data, U.S., July–Dec. 2015 vs. July–Dec. 2017
2. Google/Purchased Digital Diary, "How Consumers Solve Their Needs in the Moment," smartphone users=1,000, local searchers=634, purchases=1,140, May 2016.
