Google is expanding their offline analytics to include more in-store visitation and sales data?

Two days ago, at the Google Marketing Next Event at San Francisco, the company made several exciting announcements in regards to their ads and analytics related products. The most interesting ones are the new location extensions for YouTube and in-store measurements for AdWords.

 

The YouTube extensions means that address/map location, hours, photos, call buttons and other information will soon be available for YouTube ads. It also means marketers will be able to better track the offline impact of online ad exposures. For example, store-visit measurements will soon be available for YouTube campaigns which means marketers can track total amount of store-visits driven by the video campaign.

 

In additional to that, Google is also making expansion on their in-store sales measurement for AdWords campaign. There are two levels of this measurement. The basic level will help marketers measure the in-store sales impact of AdWords campaigns. It does this by comparing store-visits using smartphone data with credit card transactions in the aggregate. This enables companies to not only measure store-visits, but also determine whether online ads managed to generate an incremental sales lift during some conversion window.

 

For companies that have customer loyalty and email data, Google allows them to import their store transactions data directly into AdWords, which will give them more information about the ad impact on product level sales in their stores.

 

These exciting additions are great news for marketers of all business size and types as they allow businesses to connect digital ads to offline visits and sales. This will enable the marketers to learn of the effectiveness of their online ad campaigns and be more creative by experimenting different ways in their online ads to boost more sales and store visits.

 

So, the trackability of every digital ad exposure to an offline event is a huge advancement in the digital marketing world and marketers everywhere must utilise this to form better and more efficient digital marketing campaigns and thus, build a stronger brand for themselves.

 

What are your guys’ thoughts on these new measurement additions by Google? Do you think the ability to track every digital ad exposure to an offline event like sales and store-visits will only boost the ability of businesses gaining the digital success they want?

 

Please share your comments and thoughts below!