Google announced that advertisers can now take advantage of Estimated Total Conversions for measuring conversions that started on the web and finished in an app, or vice versa, for display campaigns.
This will require the advertiser to set up conversion tracking on their Android and/or iOS app for in-app activities. The feature will work if the click and conversion happen on the same device or across two different ones.
“For example, let’s say you’re a clothing retailer,” explains product manager Levent Besik. “Shoppers might click your Display ad for blue jeans on their smartphones while reading the news in a browser, then buy those jeans later in your app on the same device. You’ll now be able to measure these conversions that occur between web and apps as part of Estimated Total Conversions.”
“Similarly, let’s say you’re the marketing manager for a hotel whose ad for a summer getaway runs in a weather app,” Besik adds. “Potential customers may click on your ad while checking the weather on their smartphones in the morning and then book rooms later in the day on your website from their computers, or with your app on their tablets. You’ll now be able to measure these conversions that start on one device and finish on another, whether between web and app or between apps.”
Cross-device conversions come from aggregated, anonymized data from users who have previously signed into Google services.
Google discusses Estimated Total Conversions and conversions between mobile apps and the web here.
Late last year, Google added store visit conversions to estimated total conversions in AdWords, aimed at letting advertisers in the U.S. get an idea of how many people are visiting their stores as a result of their ads.
“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,” Google explained at the time. “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.”
According to the company, roughly 95% of retail sales take place in physical stores, but 32% of consumers say location-based search ads have led them to visit a store or make a purchase.
Google is now sharing some new research about how the feature has been helping businesses. It says retailers in the U.S. are measuring, on average, four times more conversions overall and ten times more conversions on mobile when including store visit data as part of their search ads performance.
In the auto and travel verticals, it says, advertisers are measuring double the conversions.
“This means an auto dealer can attribute twice as much impact for every click on their AdWords search ads because they are now able to include visits to their showrooms,” says Surojit Chatterjee, Director of Product Management, Mobile Search Ads at Google.
Chatterjee highlights Sephora and Buffalo Wild Wings as brands that have had major success with store visits.
“With AdWords store visits data, Sephora is able to measure how digital advertising acts as a magnet to draw customers into its 803 US stores,” he says. “Sephora learned that it receives an 18% higher store visits rate from mobile clicks compared to desktop. Based on that data, Sephora optimized its mobile bidding strategy to achieve a 25% higher return on ad spend than when measuring the impact of paid search on ecommerce sales alone. With insights from store visits, Sephora continues to use Local Inventory Ads to let customers looking for lipstick, eyeliner, or perfume know when those products are available at a nearby store.”
“Buffalo Wild Wings, a national restaurant and sports bar franchise with over 1,000 locations, used insights from store visits data to validate and adjust its bidding strategy and realized an 84% lift in conversions,” he adds. “Buffalo Wild Wings is also optimizing bids for local keywords and improving the online to offline guest experience. For example, its mobile search ads feature location extensions that show phone numbers and directions to nearby restaurants and to people searching for wings, beer and live sports.”
In a blog post, Google cites 2012 PWC research indicating that 88% of shoppers in the United States do research online on their phones, tablets, or computers, before making an offline purchase. Given that this data is about three years old, one can only imagine that the percentage has only increased if anything (especially for phones and tablets).
Google announced that it will be rolling out store visit measurement to advertisers in the U.S. as an enhancement to Estimated Total Conversions, which it launched last year.
Estimated Total Conversions is designed to show advertisers the conversions they see immediately, like online sales, in addition to an estimate of conversions that will likely take multiple devices to complete. Store visits are a pretty big metric in that department, so this is a major addition to the feature.
“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,” says Google. “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.”
To be eligible to measure store visit conversions, advertisers must have a Google My Business account linked to their AdWords account, set up location extensions, have multiple physical store locations in the U.S., and receive a large number of both ad clicks and store visits. In other words, it’s not going to be available to the average small business. At least not yet.
“If you’re eligible, conversions from store visits will be added to the ‘Estimated Total Conversion’ columns in your campaign reports,” Google says. “You’ll also see a new conversion action called ‘Store visits’ added to your conversion reports. If you don’t see store visit data in your account and believe you qualify, reach out to your Google AdWords representative.”
According to the company, roughly 95% of retail sales take place in physical stores, but 32% of consumers say location-based search ads have led them to visit a store or make a purchase.
Google is using consumers’ smartphones to track their locations and physical world shopping activities so they can give that data to advertisers as evidence of conversions for online ads that led to in-store purchases.
John McDermott recently reported in a Digiday article:
Google is beta-testing a program that uses smartphone location data to determine when consumers visit stores, according to agency executives briefed on the program by Google employees. Google then connects these store visits to Google searches conducted on smartphones in an attempt to prove that its mobile ads do, in fact, work.
If someone conducts a Google mobile search for “screwdrivers,” for instance, a local hardware store could bid to have its store listing served to that user. By pairing that person’s location data with its database of store listings, Google can see if the person who saw that ad subsequently visited the store.
Google hinted at this in an announcement a little over a month ago for Estimated Total Conversions, but didn’t go into much detail about that aspect.
“As consumers are increasingly on the go and switching between devices, marketers are telling us they want to see a more complete and accurate picture of how their online advertising drives conversions,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s SVP, Ads and Commerce, at the time. “Conversions can come in many forms: visits to stores, phone calls, app downloads, website sales or purchases made after consulting various devices. Getting better insight into these complex purchase paths can help you optimize your online advertising and allocate budget more effectively.”
Over time, he said, Google would be adding more conversion types to Estimated Total Conversions, such as store visits and phone calls.
“We are committed to helping you gain insight into the new conversion types that are part of a constantly connected, multi-screen world so that you can make the best advertising decisions possible,” he said. “In addition to cross-device conversions, both phone calls and store visits will be included as part of Estimated Total Conversions in the coming months. These are important conversions to consider — people make more than 40M calls to businesses each month directly from Google ads and are often looking for physical store locations when they search on Google, particularly on the go.”
The lines between online and off are obviously getting increasingly blurry. Facebook and Cisco recently partnered up for in-store customer check-ins, which lead to demographic data for ad targeting, for example.
Look at things like PayPal’s Payment Code and Beacon, which let users pay by checking into stores with their mobile apps or in some cases not even having to touch their phones. It’s not too hard to see Google Wallet making similar moves somewhere down the road.
It’s also not hard to imagine Google using data its using for Estimated Total Conversions to drive users to drive consumers toward advertisers via Google Now. You know, like reminding you that you need that screwdriver when you’re close to the hardware store that’s selling it.
Google announced the launch of Estimated Total Conversions for search ads in AdWords. This feature is designed to show advertisers the conversions they see immediately, like online sales, in addition to an estimate of conversions that will likely take multiple devices to complete.
“Estimated Total Conversions will provide you with a holistic view of all of the conversions driven by your Google search advertising that can be used to make important decisions like how much to bid and how to assign budget across your various marketing channels,” says Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP, Ads and Commerce at Google. “For the last few years, many sophisticated advertisers have been using their own analysis to get to these insights. Today, we are beginning to bring this level of insight and measurement to all advertisers.”
Google is kicking off the feature by rolling out estimated cross-device conversions globally. Google says it will eventually add other conversion types (like phone calls, store visits and conversions from ads on the search and display network).
Google says it has analyzed data across thousands of advertisers looking at cross-device conversion patterns. Here’s a look at some of the data for a few verticals:
This is just the latest in a series of AdWords feature releases designed to give advertisers better insights into conversions.
In August, Google launched cross-account conversion tracking and search funnels, enabling advertisers with multiple AdWords accounts to measure across accounts with a single tag and combined reports. Last month, the company launched the AdWords “conversion import” feature, making it easier for advertisers to measure and optimize events that happen away from their sites.
