Is Anyone using Store Visit Conversions In Google Adwords???

[Rick Buffkin]

I saw a post on Driving Sales today about Store Visit Conversions and now being able to track them in Google Adwords. Basically it helps you keep track of how your ad click's influence store visits. I called Adwords support this afternoon and then gentleman on the phone told me that it's been available for roughly 6 months. There are some requirements you have to meet in order to have it activated though. Just curious if any of you guys have activated it.

Quick Blurb from the Google Adwords Help page:
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If 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.

Store visit conversions are only available to certain advertisers. Review the requirements below and talk to your account representative if you think you're eligible.

Benefits

• See which campaigns and devices drive the most store visits to your business
• Understand your return on investment (ROI) and make more informed decisions about your ad creatives, spend, bid strategies, and other elements of your campaigns

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Link to Google for details and how to see it once activated

Link to the Post on DrivingSales

 

[mikeelmore]

Nice post Rick, another great metric for tracking, I am really digging your great GA posts lately, Thank you...

 

[ed.brooks]

• See which campaigns and devices drive the most store visits to your business
• Understand your return on investment (ROI) and make more informed decisions about your ad creatives, spend, bid strategies, and other elements of your campaigns

Interesting, but this could be HIGHLY misleading as well, especially if you're employing 'lack click' attribution.

Consider the scenario that Steve White wrote about in "The True Cost of Google Analytics"

"A customer first discovers your dealership via a third-party auto listing site. Then they come back to your site later by searching your dealer name on Google and clicking on an AdWords listing, which perhaps was right above a free Google organic listing for your website. By default, in Google Analytics, that AdWords click took 100% credit for that visitor, assuming as a fact that it was incredibly valuable, when it may have had no impact at all on whether or not that sale was made." ​

Where Steve says a third-party listing site, you could just as well say newspaper, or TV, or mailer, etc.

The point being you haven't determined who or what influenced the consumer, so you are no closer to determining a true ROI.

I see a tremendous benefit for Google, being able to claim credit for everything that happened before the click, but limited insight for the advertiser.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

@Ed Brooks, Personally I think it would be a great additional metric to have in the toolbox. Especially, adding a metric like this to VDP view's. There are many touch points that influence a customer on the path to purchase. A dealer simply can't put all of their eggs in one or two baskets weather they think that basket is AT, Cars, Google, TV or any other marketing channel. You have to have a nice mix of each. Then measure that mix. Keep measuring and tweaking.

My thinking is, If I can simply get a gauge on what my paid search provided me via in store traffic then I should be able to take those metrics and percentages with some tweaking and apply them to the other website traffic. Cross reference that with other internal traffic reports and now I have a great benchmark and now I have a more solid approach to moving a needle.

Also, Have you guys seen this??

Basically real time traffic for a business

 

[Alexander Lau]

There are many factors that bring in a potential buyer, buyer or lifetime buyer into the showroom (not all buyers are the same either, we're all different). There's no one reason, it's a multitude of reasons.

I'm sure this has been discussed here many times. But how do you measure an up that has been marketed to through billboards, newspaper, TV, PPC (paid search, display, video) and organically, for example? Which marketing piece truly brought in the customer? How do you measure or weigh it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing
Neuromarketing is a field that claims to apply the principles of neuroscience to marketing research, studying consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli.

I will say, I do like the concept of implementing biometrics in the automotive showroom / lot. Some start-up will tackle this at some point and easily provide reports and details on "real" automotive shoppers and / or buyers. It's not a bad idea...

http://www.icon-uk.net/biometrics-in-retail
http://findbiometrics.com/significant-growth-predicted-for-biometrics-in-retail-301223/
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...technology-nec-safran--suprema-300208400.html

 

[ed.brooks]

@Ed Brooks, Personally I think it would be a great additional metric to have in the toolbox. Especially, adding a metric like this to VDP view's. There are many touch points that influence a customer on the path to purchase. A dealer simply can't put all of their eggs in one or two baskets weather they think that basket is AT, Cars, Google, TV or any other marketing channel. You have to have a nice mix of each. Then measure that mix. Keep measuring and tweaking.

My thinking is, If I can simply get a gauge on what my paid search provided me via in store traffic then I should be able to take those metrics and percentages with some tweaking and apply them to the other website traffic. Cross reference that with other internal traffic reports and now I have a great benchmark and now I have a more solid approach to moving a needle.

Also, Have you guys seen this??

Basically real time traffic for a business

@Rick Buffkin I agree completely that a dealer can't put all their marketing eggs in one basket!

My issue is with Google touting the 'benefits'; i.g. "which campaigns and devices drive the most store visits" and "understand your return on investment (ROI)". All this will tell you is that, at one point in time, a consumer clicked on an AdWord and at some later point they visited your location. It will NOT tell you what "drove" the customer to your store. To do that, you have to measure influence, and Google Analytics doesn't do a very good job at that.

My sense is that this a shiny object that Google is dangling in front of dealers. Yes, look at the metric, but don't give it very much weight.

 

[jimbell]

@edbrooks

Interesting, but this could be HIGHLY misleading as well, especially if you're employing 'lack click' attribution.

I wouldn't call it last click attribution, but what we are seeing is (From Joe's DSES presentation):



We can see when the visitor clicked on the ad and then had the in-store visit. We are seeing similar metrics with other dealers that we are testing this with. No, we can't see what other 3rd parties they are visiting, but this definitely gives a little bigger picture of what is going on with some of the AdWords spends.

 

[ed.brooks]

@edbrooks


I wouldn't call it last click attribution, but what we are seeing is (From Joe's DSES presentation):

View attachment 3155

We can see when the visitor clicked on the ad and then had the in-store visit. We are seeing similar metrics with other dealers that we are testing this with. No, we can't see what other 3rd parties they are visiting, but this definitely gives a little bigger picture of what is going on with some of the AdWords spends.

I agree, @jimbell, this isn't last click attribution -- it's more like random click attribution. One click, at some point in time, taking 100% of the credit for the sale -- regardless of actual influence. Did this click occur in a vacuum, meaning that nothing else affected the purchase?

I'm sorry, I don't see how this adds clarity to the big picture. Yes, it is an additional metric -- one more piece of a much larger puzzle. But this could be assigning 100% of the credit to a click that had minimal impact on the customer decision to buy and, in fact, may not have contributed to the 'visit'.

 

[Mark A Hoffman]

There is no bad data; there is only poorly interpreted data. Google's data is merely a metric and it's useful from that standpoint.

Attribution models are just that; models. It's nice when we can easily attribute a sale or visitor, but even without that, there are still proven ways to measure lift. Marketing companies have been doing this for years, even before digital.

If you're mathematically inlined, or really bored, take a look at things like Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curves, analysis of variance (ANOVA) or Bayesian statistics. These are tools that have been around for years and can still be used to help determine if a marketing campaign or vendor is having an impact on site visits, phone calls, leads, sales, etc. Granted, to do that kind of analysis by hand is time consuming and unless the person doing it has a data-science background, they risk making the wrong conclusions about the data. But it is possible to get an idea of the impact of marketing efforts, if they are conducted in a controlled way, even without direct attribution models.

As an example of this, one of the projects I am working on now is measuring the impact of radio and TV spots and see what kind of lift is generated from them, and to see if there are specific times or days that have more of an impact. I'm still gathering and analyzing the data, but once I'm finished, I'll write up the methods I used and post the results.

 

[ed.brooks]

There is no bad data; there is only poorly interpreted data. Google's data is merely a metric and it's useful from that standpoint.

Attribution models are just that; models. It's nice when we can easily attribute a sale or visitor, but even without that, there are still proven ways to measure lift. Marketing companies have been doing this for years, even before digital.

If you're mathematically inlined, or really bored, take a look at things like Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curves, analysis of variance (ANOVA) or Bayesian statistics. These are tools that have been around for years and can still be used to help determine if a marketing campaign or vendor is having an impact on site visits, phone calls, leads, sales, etc. Granted, to do that kind of analysis by hand is time consuming and unless the person doing it has a data-science background, they risk making the wrong conclusions about the data. But it is possible to get an idea of the impact of marketing efforts, if they are conducted in a controlled way, even without direct attribution models.

As an example of this, one of the projects I am working on now is measuring the impact of radio and TV spots and see what kind of lift is generated from them, and to see if there are specific times or days that have more of an impact. I'm still gathering and analyzing the data, but once I'm finished, I'll write up the methods I used and post the results.

Doing this sort of analysis by hand, as you note @Mark A Hoffman, is not easy and I think that is part of the reason why dealers see this as a daunting task. And that is exactly why I welcome the entry of advanced analytics platforms like Transparency.ai and Clarivoy.com into the auto dealer space. In fact, Clarivoy won the 2016 Driving Sales Innovation Cup with their TV Analytics solution. Take a look at the presentation I linked to; I think you'll find it interesting.