If you run an eCommerce and have physical outlets, you’d probably want to know if your online marketing campaigns influence visits and purchases at your offline locations. Thankfully, you can track conversions that happen at your physical store outlets!

How?

The answer is store visiting conversion tracking, and we can show you how to set it up!

Most customers research products online before making their purchases — whether online or otherwise. Therefore, even if some of these customers eventually walk into your physical outlets to buy from you, it is very likely that your digital ad campaigns had something to do with it.

But how do you know for sure?

Google Ads allows you to keep track of customers who have interacted with your online ads and alerts you if they eventually walk into your physical store. Not to worry, we’ll walk you through how to set up store visit conversion tracking for your eCommerce.

However, let us first take a quick detour.

What is a Store Visit Conversion?

A store visit conversion refers to a customer who first encountered your brand online but eventually made a purchase offline at one of your physical stores.

With this Google Ads feature, eCommerce owners can gain insight into the correlation between their in-store customer traffic and their location-based online ads. 

Here’s how it works: 

Google determines if a user who clicked on your search ads eventually visited your physical store by analyzing phone location data.

While this information is usually an estimate, Google Ads tracks your prospects across various devices, including smartphones, tablets, and PCs, to make the data more accurate.

However, with the store visit metrics, there is no guarantee that these visitors bought from you. But, you can be sure that they discovered your brand online, and this was enough push to get them to visit your store.

That said, data from in-store conversion tracking is anonymous and based on aggregated data collected from several customers who turned on their Location History. In other words, you can trace a conversion back to a specific ad click or person.

Before we examine how to set up store visit conversion tracking, let us explore some of this metric's benefits for eCommerce owners.

Advantages of Tracking Store Visits Conversion

Here are some top reasons you should track your store visit conversions:

• It helps you understand how effective your omnichannel marketing is
• It highlights which of your ad campaigns drive the most visits to your physical store
• It gives you a more comprehensive view of your marketing returns
• It provides some of the data you need to evaluate and optimize your marketing strategies and other elements of your sales efforts.

What is Store Visit Conversion Tracking in Google Ads?

So, how does store visit conversion work? Let us break it down for you. 

First, when customers log in to their Google account, they can choose to have their location history saved in their account settings. If they do, Google will show them your ads if they are location-based. Of course, some of these ad viewers may eventually visit your store.

When Google systems detect probable shop visits using mobile location data, it adds an extra degree of verification by questioning a limited group of users about their visits. 

Using current and historical data on the number of customers that click or view your advertising and then visit your store, Google Ads generates modeled numbers. These results then show up in your Google Ads reporting for store visits.

How to Set Up Store Visit Conversion Tracking for Your eCommerce

There are a few things to note before we get into how you can set up store visit conversion tracking.

Google has some requirements for businesses who intend to use Google Ads store visit conversion tracking:

• Your business must possess multiple stores operating in eligible locations
• Your store should receive more than thousands of ad clicks and viewable impressions
• You must connect your My Business account and Google Ads account
• The location extension should be enabled on the My Business account
• Each store location must be added to the Google My Business account
• At least 90% of the extensions must be verified and approved by Google My business
• You must provide store visit data.

If your business is eligible for store visits conversion tracking, you can proceed to this next part without any issues.

Nonetheless, here is how to set up store visit conversion tracking:

• First, you’ll need to sign in to your Google Ads account
• Then, navigate to the upper right corner of your screen and click on the Tools icon
• Next, under Measurement, select Conversions
• Choose Store Visit Conversion
• Next, click on Edit Goal
• Choose Use as an Account Goal
• Then, decide on which action is your primary and secondary
• Finally, click Save Changes.

Google ads will now track store visiting conversions for your eCommerce.

To make sure your Store Visit metrics show with your other conversion metrics in your Google Ads report:

• After you sign in to your Google Ads account, navigate to the left page menu and click on Campaigns
• Click the columns icon on top of the statistics table
• From the drop-down, select Modify columns
• Click the Conversions section, and check the box next to "All Conv."
• Click on Apply.

The "All conversions" column will now appear in your reports.

Wrapping Up

While store visit conversion metrics may not be as precise as eCommerce website conversion, they can be valuable for optimizing your online ads for the best content, keyword, and even audiences that improve your store traffic.

Therefore, by tracking your store visits, you gain insight into how effective your Google Ad campaign really is.

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand how to set up store visit conversion tracking!