Many business owners know that PPC advertising through Google Ads is an excellent way to encourage people to visit a website or buy a product online. However, Google has much more to offer than just online advertising. Over the years, the company has added many ad products for local business owners. In their latest bid to help offline retailers, Google Ads is a Store Visits optimization option for ads that use smart bidding. 

Business owners should spend their advertising budget promoting the actions that have the highest ROI, not the activities that are easiest to perform. Google lets advertisers choose the goals that are most important to them with smart bidding optimization. A new option will let store owners prioritize store visits over other kinds of actions.

In a post announcing the new feature, John Chen of Google Ads wrote, “Over 70% of advertisers already use Smart Bidding, but until today, you could only optimize for online conversions. Store visits in your Smart Bidding allows you to optimize for total omnichannel performance more holistically, helping you drive better results while saving you time.”

Some of the stores that were part of the beta trial reported that the new ad setting worked well for them. However, the testimonial that Google provides isn’t one from North America. Apparently, some of the beta testings occurred in Turkey. MediaMarkt is Europe’s largest retailer of consumer electronics. The company saw good results when they tested the new store visits option.

According to Selçuk Kaya, the Digital Marketing Manager for MediaMarkt Turkey, “As a part of MediaMarkt Turkey’s growth strategy, our aim is to drive traffic both online and in stores. By switching our bidding strategy from online-only to omnichannel, we were able to increase omnichannel revenue by 113% in our test campaigns. We plan to roll this approach out across other campaigns.” 

This new PPC advertising option for local retailers is coming out at the perfect time. The holiday shopping season is nearly here. Having an optimization strategy that will encourage consumers to visit a store could boost holiday sales for brick and mortar retailers. Advertisers have about a month to test the system and see how well it works for them. 

Google knows that people are eager to test the bidding strategy, but they are urging a little bit of restraint. It’s possible to set the smart bidding strategy to store visits at the account level, which would make it the strategy for all the ads for the account. However, Google is recommending that advertisers try the new approach at the campaign level. It’s now possible to test incorporating store visits into your Smart Bidding strategy for select Search and Shopping campaigns.

For advertisers that want to go beyond these test offerings, Google has another beta that may interest advertisers. At the end of the announcement for store visits optimization, Google suggests that advertisers who would like to run a similar test in a subset of their Shopping campaigns could contact your Google account team to participate in the Shopping conversion goals beta.

For more recent news about the latest updates to Google Ads, read this article on the recently added optimization options for Enhanced CPC ads on the platform.