In recent years, a growing share of car buyers are using the web to research and compare vehicle options before making a purchase.

Consumers are increasingly exposed to advertisements throughout their online shopping journey. According to a study by Facebook in 2016, people use mobile in 45% of all shopping journeys. However, more than 90% of retail sales are still taking place in stores.

The challenge for automotive professionals today is to create a link between search ads and dealer visits. Dealers know that people research cars on the web but it is difficult to track which online action actually leads to a dealer visit or a purchase.

Google’s “store visit conversion” metric is the solution for making the link between clicks on search ads and in-store visits. We will be discussing examples of case studies from Honda Australia, Nissan UK, and Hyundai UK that have successfully implemented this conversion model and have proven successful.

Definition of the store visit conversion type

Google announced in December 2014 that the metric called “in-store visit” would be counted as an offline AdWords conversion.

This type of conversion allows you to measure the impact of clicks generated by ads on the number of in-store visits. The advantage of this metric is that it enables advertisers to identify the campaigns and devices (such as mobile or desktop) that generate the most visits to points of sale. It also enables advertisers to better analyze ROI and to make more informed decisions, when creating AdWords search ads, in relation to spending and bid strategies.

How the store visit metric works and its terms of use

Users who agree to share their location history are tracked by Google to measure their clicks on AdWords ads as well as their in-store visits. Via an algorithm, Google extrapolates this data to also take into account unconnected users. The data numbers come from anonymous and cumulative statistics. AdWords is thus able to estimate the number of people who visited a store after clicking on an ad.

In order to be eligible to measure store visit conversions, a company needs to fulfill specific requirements. The company must have multiple physical store locations, have ads that record several thousand clicks as well as receive a large number of in-store visits each month. It is also important to associate the company’s MyBusiness account with its AdWords account and to activate location extensions.2 Because of these requirement, this feature is so far mainly reserved for hotel chains, restaurants, cinemas, and car dealerships.

After spending several months in Alpha and then Beta, this metric was one of the main subjects discussed at the 2016 Google Performance Summit. It was at this summit that Google confirmed having made improvements to the feature and announced plans to make it available to a wider selection of businesses.

Successful tracking of store visit conversions in the automotive industry

A case study conducted by Google looked at the 107 dealerships that constitute Honda Australia. Using the store visit conversion tool, Honda was able to measure the statistics of Google users who clicked on one of their search ads and then visited a Honda dealer. The results of the study showed that a 6.1% share of paid clicks from computers were followed by a visit to a dealer within 30 days. This number was even higher on mobile: 7.4%. Honda was subsequently able to develop more efficient and effective online marketing campaigns while controlling their return on investment (ROI).

For Nissan UK, tracking store visit conversions made it possible to measure ROI more effectively and allowed the dealership group to make more informed decisions about advertising creatives, budgets, offers, and overall marketing strategy. The Nissan Group is even able to further customize their customer relationships in order to achieve more sales.

Hyundai UK was able to demonstrate in its latest study with Google the importance of digital marketing campaigns in generating more in-store conversions. The Hyundai group tested two brand keyword campaigns over a 6-week period. Close to 5% of mobile clicks led to a dealer visit within 30 days. The campaigns thus generated over 300,000 monthly visits to the website and more than 8,000 in-store visits.

The way consumers buy vehicles is constantly evolving. It is therefore important that car dealers take into account the large role mobile plays in consumer purchasing activities and make the effort to optimize the shopping journey of their customers.

The next challenge will be to measure the number of in-store sales generated by an AdWords campaign. Google already offers a tool for tracking store sales conversions, so there is little doubt that this practice will become more common in the months to come.