Searches for “open now near me” have grown globally by over 400% YoY, proving that consumers are increasingly searching with local intent. Therefore, your brand must be able to serve its audience with the required information.
Paid search ads are one tactic that can support buyers in this stage of their journey, influencing them to visit your store in a specified location.
In this article, we’ll explore how you can optimise your search advertising efforts to drive your audience to your brick-and-mortar location with Google Ads.
Tailoring ad copy to drive store visits
An important aspect of driving customers to your physical store is tailoring ad copy so it’s localised. An effective way to do this would be to set up location insertion within your responsive search ads. This is a great way for advertisers who have stores in multiple cities as this method allows you to easily customise ads in one go without having to write individual headlines for different locations.
If you’re a brand with multiple physical locations in the same city, e.g. a logistics company, we would recommend including headlines similar to ‘We deliver to {Location(City)} which will ensure that, depending on the user’s location settings, your ad will display the city in the headline that’s closest to them e.g. ‘We deliver to Birmingham’.
Another recommendation to optimise your ad copy for store visits would be to call out any unique selling points for customers who visit your store. Examples include free in-store collection, opening hours, or even the number of stores within a specific location, highlighting the convenience of visiting the physical store.
Drive high-intent audiences to their closest store
Customers will show intent from the get-go when they’re interested in visiting your physical store. These users will be searching with a level of readiness that presents them as the right target audience.
Shoppers use Google to ‘guide their decision-making process across the funnel’ so it’s crucial that your paid search ads capitalise on those searching for your physical location. In Google Ads, you’ll often see search terms appearing for users searching for ‘nearest X to me’ or ‘X near me’. These search terms display strong intent, so we need to ensure we capture them.
A typical campaign structure for this would be to segment these terms into their own ad group. We implemented this structure for a logistics client who had a KPI of driving store visits in addition to driving online conversions. By segmenting these terms and utilising more bespoke ad copy, we saw a +38% uplift in CTR and a -12% decrease in CPCs month-on-month.
Grow store visits with Performance Max for shop goals
For businesses wanting to grow their offline sales, setting up a Performance Max campaign for shop goals will provide a centralised area to manage budgets, utilise image and video assets, as well as take advantage of Google’s largest properties such as Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail & Display Network to increase consumer visibility.
This campaign type increases user engagement with your brand during the research phase, and Google will optimise your campaign to help connect your business with its target customers.
To find out more about the different types of offline conversion imports, click here
