Keep Track of Your Customers
What’s going on, guys?
Today, I am going to talk about tracking store visits and Google Analytics. This is great, especially for anyone who’s in retail, brick-and-mortar stores, restaurants, bars, or anything in hospitality. Getting people to come into your business is huge for you because it’s how you make money. It can be very hard using multiple digital platforms to drive people to your website, without knowing if they end up converting.
Let’s say you have a restaurant.
Unless you’re running coupons, deals, redemptions, driving people to book a reservation through OpenTable, or something like that, you don’t really know how much your efforts are translating into business for yourself.
Store Visit Tracking
One of the things you can do is set up store visit tracking in Google Analytics and Google Ads. Let’s walk you through how that’s calculated first before we dive into it because that’s a really common question. People want to know: How am I able to track how many people come into my location?
It’s a complex answer.
The biggest way is through location services on anyone’s phone. It’s on both iPhone and Android. Wi-Fi networks you connect to are another way. If you’re near a Starbucks and your phone picks up that Starbucks Wi-Fi—even if you don’t connect to it—the fact that your phone even senses that network tells Google essentially that you’re in the vicinity of that Wi-Fi network. Also, any Google app that you can log into—that goes for Google Drive, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Android, Photos, Calendars, and even the Google app for iPhone. Any of those devices that you’re logged into or use on a daily basis, especially your calendar and Google Maps, is able to report that location data back.
I spoke to an engineer at Google Marketing Live about a month ago, and they assured me that these store visits—this metric—is 100 percent accurate. There’s literally no way it can be false. That’s crazy. Let me show you how you can set up these store visits.
How to Set up Store Visits
I actually have this information right here. I’ll read it to you:
There are seven factors to set up store visits:
1) You have to have a Google My Business account.
That’s pretty standard. Anyone who’s running regular SEO or who has a brick-and-mortar location usually has Google My Business accounts set up.
2) You have to have active location extensions in Google Ads.
That’s the biggest thing. You need to be running Google Ads to track these as conversions. If you’re running Google Ads, you probably have those location extensions set up.
3) You need your Google My Business and Google Ads accounts linked and have at least 90 percent verified Google My Business listings.
(Again, pretty standard.)
4) You need to have a Google Analytics account.
5) You need to link your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account.
6) Your set of location extensions have to be imported from Google My Business.
(Again, another thing that you would likely just do.)
7) You have to enable Google signals
Which is as simple as checking a box. It’s pretty simple to implement store visits. You just need to be running Google Ads and Google Analytics. You check a few boxes here and there, make sure everything is imported from those accounts and syncing with each other, between Google My Business, Google Analytics, and Google Ads, and you’re ready to rock n’ roll. It might take up to 60 days for that location data to start populating, but once it does, you’re good to go. You’ll be able to see exactly how many people you’re driving into your brick-and-mortar locations, which is great!
That’s all I have for today.
Thank you.
Happy Wednesday!
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