Setting up Store Visits in Google Analytics

Right, good news for our retail clients…

Google is enabling “Store visits” reporting inside Google Analytics, which means users who comes from paid / organic via Google and then visit each physical store are recorded. So how do they do this?

…. “Store visits are estimates based on data from users who have turned on Location History”. That means, when a Google user has their location history turned on inside Google Maps (you can turn it off), Google will record a) website visit and b) store visit.

A small miracle in omni-channel marketing for retail businesses .

There’s one more catch… Google require you to have 90% of your retail stores with a Google My Business citation information up to date and that these are linked locations verified to Adwords accounts.

This is one of the reasons why setting up the Google Ad Campaigns by geo / retail store is so important and where lots of retail clients do not. By having 1 campaign for each store practice linked via a Location Extension to each corresponding Google My Business citation and then syncing the account, the activation for “Store visits”  reporting will appear.

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