Store visits in Google Ads

Source: Google Ads Help, About store visit conversions.

Nobody counts store visits one by one. Google uses anonymous, aggregated data on people who clicked or saw your ads, models visits from current and past data, then scales the result to your whole audience. It checks its models against surveys of a panel of volunteers.

Eligibility comes before any figure. Your stores must be in a supported country and linked through location assets or affiliate locations, active and showing in your campaigns. Locations from Business Profile must be verified there. Ads need enough clicks or impressions, and stores enough visitors, to pass Google's privacy thresholds. Sensitive places, health or religious sites for instance, are left out.

How to read it

Treat store visits as an estimate with a margin, not a till receipt. Read them per month and per campaign, never per day. They land in All conversions, so they stay out of Conversions unless store visits is a goal your campaigns bid on, as with store goals in Performance Max.

Whether the ads caused the visits is a separate question, answered by a test; see incrementality.

A worked example

A chain of four garden centres spends €6,000 in April on Search and Performance Max. Google reports 1,500 store visits after a click and 400 after a view. Cost per visit after a click is €4.

Till data says about 60% of visitors buy, spending €38 on average. That suggests around €34,200 of in-store sales against €6,000 of spend. The chain reads it as a direction, and checks it each spring by pausing ads in one region for two weeks.

1. Check that location assets are active and showing in each campaign, or store visits will not be reported.
2. Look for the Store visits action Google creates on its own, under Goals, then Conversions, then Summary.
3. In Campaigns, click Segment, then Conversions, then Conversion action, and read the Store visits row in All conv.
4. Read View-through conv. too, where visits after a YouTube or Display view land.

Optizads reads two figures. Store visits is Google's estimate after a click on an ad. Store visits after a view is the estimate after an ad was seen and not clicked. Both are stored for each campaign and each day, and summed for the period you choose.

They sit in the Local actions group of the metric picker, beside Directions, Call button clicks, Menu views, Orders, Store website visits and Other local actions, each with its after-a-view twin.

Optizads reads the last 35 days again every night, so later figures replace earlier ones. For a cost per visit, a calculated metric divides Spend by Store visits. Set a goal on it in Settings, Goals, and its card on the Overview can draw the goal line.

If your tills log footfall or sales in a spreadsheet, a Google Sheets metric reads it each night. Google's estimate and your own count then sit side by side in a report's Key figures.

• Reading store visits day by day, when the estimate only holds over weeks.
• Adding store visits to online conversions in one total and calling it results.
• Taking every estimated visit as caused by the ads without a test.
• Turning off location assets in a campaign, which stops the reporting.

• Location asset: An address, distance and map link shown with the ad, taken from a linked Business Profile.
• Performance Max: A campaign type that runs on Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps from one budget, with Google deciding where each ad shows.
• View-through conversion: A conversion after someone saw an ad but did not click it.
• Incrementality: The part of a result that would not have happened without the ad.

• All conversions: All conversions is the Google Ads column that counts every conversion the account records, including the actions not used for bidding.
• Phone-through rate: Phone-through rate is the share of the times your phone number showed in an ad that ended in a call.
• Conversions (by conv. time): Conversions (by conv. time) counts each conversion on the day it happened, not on the day of the ad click that led to it.