Conversions are a major metric for determining the success of your advertising campaigns, but are you actually capturing all of your conversions? Last year Google launched an initiative to improve their ability to reveal the full success of their campaigns. According to a post this month, those improvements are making it a lot easier for businesses to track their offline conversion results.

Store Visits

For a brick and mortar business, the arrival of a customer is an event to celebrate. It’s the culmination of all the work you’ve put into getting your business noticed. Finding a way to track that customer’s path to your store is crucial to repeating that success. Google is offering one solution to that, filling in the gaps by associating ad clicks with location data from anonymous users’ mobile devices.

Open Sign
Every customer at your door might be associated with an interaction with your online ad campaign.

Unfortunately, this feature is currently limited to larger stores that have more than one physical store location and a high volume of traffic. Fortunately, there’s a lot a small business can learn from the results those advertisers are seeing. According to Google’s data:

…retailers are measuring, on average, 4x more conversions overall and 10x more conversions on mobile when including store visits data as part of their search ads performance.

Your business is likely seeing far more conversions than you might think from your ads, and this is a stark reminder that targeting mobile users is a must for advertisers with a physical location.

Get the Full Picture

Even if you don’t qualify for Google’s Store Visit tracking, there are plenty of ways to track your offline conversions. Here are just a few ways to get that data:

  • Use unique phone numbers on your advertising and/or web site
  • Create coupons that are unique to certain ad campaigns
  • Offer discounts to customers who sign up for a loyalty program (and assign them a unique ID number)

If all else fails, you can always just ask your customers how they found your business. If even a few of them respond, you’ll get valuable data on what’s working to drive more people to your business.