With the holiday season just around the corner, Google Ads introduces a new feature to help drive more in-store sales from online advertising.
According to Google’s estimates, searches for products near a user’s location grew by 400% year over year. Many consumers research a product online before heading out to buy it in a physical store. While Google Ads was originally built as an advertising platform focused on online sales, in recent years it has steadily expanded its capabilities to help advertisers make the most of online advertising to boost their brick-and-mortar sales as well.
In this latest update, Google Ads has enabled its Smart Bidding capabilities for offline conversions — that is, sales made over the phone or in a physical location. Google’s AI systems now evaluate a wide range of signals to identify which users are most likely to make a purchase in-store at any given moment and adjust the amount paid per click accordingly.
The challenge of measuring sales driven by online advertising
When it comes to transactions completed in physical stores or businesses, Google relies on data provided by the advertiser to optimize its campaigns. According to information from Google:
“advertisers can upload their own store sales data in a secure and privacy-safe way to optimize their Search and Shopping campaigns to get more store sale conversions. This way, they can drive more sales at their physical locations.”
Add store sales to Smart Bidding to increase online and in-store sales - Google.com
The difficulty in tracking sales generated through online advertising lies in identifying which click or action led to a sale — whether in a physical store or via a phone call. In the case of in-store sales, Google proposes tracking via a parameter called “gclick,” which must be attached to the sales data imported into your conversion settings. Since asking each customer who makes a purchase for their “gclick” is obviously not practical, Google suggests in its implementation examples for tracking online transactions that this parameter be captured each time a user submits a contact form.
This approach may work well for businesses that require appointments, but it can be difficult to implement for a retail store or restaurant, for example. In those cases, creative workarounds are possible — such as generating personalized discount codes that can later be matched to their corresponding click identifiers. Even so, the technical complexity puts these solutions out of reach for most brick-and-mortar businesses. For them, unlocking the full potential of online advertising still takes extra creativity and effort to bridge the gap between the digital world and the physical one.
