Bring more foot traffic to your business with YouTube and Display ads

This year, around 90% of global sales will happen in a physical store.¹ To bring more shoppers through the door, businesses need tools to efficiently reach nearby consumers and measure their campaign performance across channels. That's why we introduced store visits measurement back in 2014. Since then, businesses around the world have measured over 7 billion store visits in AdWords.

Unlock offline results with YouTube

As we shared at Shoptalk Europe today, location extensions and store visits measurement are now available on YouTube. With YouTube's first-ever ad extensions for TrueView in-stream and bumper ads, you can influence viewers to engage with your brand offline and drive more visits and in-store purchases. People watching your videos will see your address, directions and business hours—right in the ad. You can then use store visits measurement to see how your video campaigns drive foot traffic and measure their performance against other online and traditional marketing channels, like television, print and radio ads.

An example location extension on YouTube featuring IHOP's address and contact information.

Says Darrin Kellaris, Executive Director, Marketing at IHOP, "Video has been an integral part of our digital strategy to optimize guest interactions online with relevant and distinctive content. We were happy to partner with Google to find new ways to measure the full value of our video campaigns. Through Google's store visits solution, we gained useful consumer insights that helped us drive visits from YouTube for less than $1 per guest. Insights like this have given us an innovative way to measure business impact beyond standard brand metrics and to understand how video helps drive lower-funnel actions. This is something we’d like to see become more prevalent across all media partners."

Jerome’s Furniture has included store visits in their Search measurement and optimization since 2015. It is now using location extensions and store visits for YouTube to drive more customers into stores and understand offline performance across channels. “YouTube has proven to send qualified visits to our stores at a very efficient cost. The visibility into YouTube's impact on store visits has opened our eyes and our investment in YouTube advertising has risen dramatically," says Scott Perry, Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing.

Elgiganten, a Swedish electronics retailer, turned to video to help drive its omnichannel marketing strategy. After the first half of 2017, the company found that its video campaigns brought 6-10% of users who viewed its ad on YouTube to its stores. Overall, the brand has seen an 8.8% increase in its sales, and learned that its mobile search traffic delivers a 21% higher return on ad spend on mobile phones versus desktop. “With store visits we are able to turn consumer insights into actions," says Niko Niva, Digital Specialist at Elgiganten. "We can see which products are more likely to drive people to the store rather than buying online, and how people who are close to a retail location and using a mobile device are more likely to visit the store."

Engage local consumers on sites and apps across the GDN

Earlier this year, we fully rolled out location extensions and store visits measurement to campaigns on the Google Display Network (GDN). Now, you can reach more nearby customers when they're ready to buy and get a better understanding of your offline performance across channels. Advertisers large and small across industries have seen success using display ads to drive customers to their physical businesses—even those who usually depend on traditional offline campaigns, like catalog and circular ads.

Lawson, a convenience store chain with nearly 15,000 stores globally, was the first advertiser in Japan to use store visits to measure the full value of its display ads. Historically, the company focused most of its advertising on offline campaigns. After testing store visits for Display, the brand learned that mobile ads were more effective and cost-efficient at driving foot traffic to their stores, saving them 45% more in costs per visit compared to desktop and tablet ads. Says Kazuya Nobe, Vice Chief Marketing Officer, "Understanding how effective our mobile display ads are and the profiles of the customers visiting our stores after seeing our online ads is a huge step forward for our business. This helps us better cater to customer needs and optimize our marketing ROI.”

The Home Depot Canada, Canada's leading home improvement retailer, used store visits insights to learn that 18% of people who clicked on its display ads visited a store within 30 days. It also discovered that 50% of these customers made an average in-store purchase of $65 Canadian dollars. "This is valuable data, and we look forward to relying on store visits insights like this to help us keep driving our online to offline marketing strategy," says Matthew Gangnier, Manager, Digital Media & Content.

In the coming weeks, we'll also begin introducing more local ad formats powered by location extensions to help people find the products they're interested in at nearby businesses. To start, we'll be rolling out affiliate location extensions for display ads, which allow manufacturing brands to show which retail chains sell their products.

An example affiliate location extension on the GDN showing where the Google Pixel is available for purchase.

If you're focused on engaging omni-channel customers, you can now use location extensions and store visits measurement across Video, Display, Search and Shopping to drive more visitors to your business offline.

Posted by Brad Bender, Vice President of Display and Video Advertising

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1. eMarketer, “Worldwide Retail and Ecommerce Sales: eMarketer's Estimates for 2016–2021,” July 2017