Why Every Retail Brand Needs to Track Store Visits

Tracking store visits in the context of your overall digital advertising strategy is one of the more effective ways to figure out if it's working the way you want it to. The beauty of digital advertising is that we can see exactly how each ad performs—how many times it’s viewed, clicked, or engaged with—and with both Google and Facebook now offering Store Visit tracking, you can even see who is entering your physical store location after viewing one of your ads through our Analytics Dashboard.

Since 89.3% of all retail sales happen offline, this metric may be the proof that your ads are working and generating results you care about.

Powerful Analytics Drive Revenue and Brand Loyalty

The store visits metric is exactly what it sounds like. It’s how many people visited your store’s location to browse products as a direct result of viewing your ad online. Advertising platforms like Google and Facebook measure this information based on anonymous data using dozens of intent signals.

In order to use the data, your business must have an online presence on Google. To begin, set up a Google My Business Account for your store.

Additionally, you could also use Facebook to build an online presence—it can yield highly successful results depending on your target demographic. Facebook tracks how many people visit your stores by a number of different signals, including:

• When store visitors enable their mobile device’s location services
  
• Satellite imagery and mapping data based on the location boundaries of your store
  
• Filtering out employees or people moving past your store instead of stopping in

Using this data, you can fine-tune your campaign to ensure it is delivering the results your business cares about. It also helps keep your budget on track.

Measuring Return on Ad Spend

One of the hardest parts of digital marketing is knowing what’s working, and what’s not. Is your advertising paying off? One way to answer that question is by measuring your Return on Ad Spend.

By combining store visits with some of the other useful metrics that Google and Facebook provide, you can easily monitor your budget and set goals for your ad campaigns. Specifically, you can use your total ad spend for a specific campaign and the estimated total revenue from that campaign to determine Return on Ad Spend.

While there are a variety of “acceptable” ROAS models, a common benchmark standard is 4:1. That is, your revenue should be $4 for every $1 that you spend on ads.

For example, let’s say you spend $2,000 on an ad campaign in one month. By tracking your in-store visits, as well as your close ratio, total sales, and profits, you estimate that your total revenue for that month is $10,000. By dividing your total revenue, $10,000, by your ad spend, $2,000, you can estimate that your ROAS is 5. For every $1 spent on advertising, your business brought in $5.

A Strong Online Presence Guarantees Strong Sales

While tracking your store visits is an important metric for measuring the success of your digital advertising, it all ties back to your online presence. Today, consumers are largely searching for your store online before they come in to make a purchase. If they can’t find you online, you’re going to lose out on that sale.

Having a strong presence on both Google and Facebook will lead more consumers to your front door, where they’re ready to make a purchasing decision. Some tips for maintaining a strong online presence for your business include:

• Setting up your business on Google My Business and getting it verified
• Creating a Facebook profile for your business with all the necessary information (location, contact info, etc.)
• Promoting your business on Facebook, Google, and other social media platforms like Instagram.

TL;DR: Tracking Store Visits Leads to Decreased Ad Spend and Improved Sales

Tracking your store visits is just one piece of the bigger digital advertising puzzle. When you have this strong understanding of your physical store visits—and how they relate to your ad performance—you can better allocate funding to different parts of your campaign, decreasing ad spend while maintaining strong sales.

It is a valuable way to measure the effectiveness of your overall strategy, and it allows you to fine-tune your campaigns to save money, reach more qualified customers, and generate more in-store sales.