Throughout the evolution of social media as marketing medium there's been one question that's persisted through all the updates and iterations and stats. That question? What's the ROI of social?
There are various answers to this, of course, and really, it's impossible to provide one, all-encompassing response as the benefits vary case-by-case, but what is clear is that there are benefits to brands being active and available on social media channels. Every day, more and more people and spending more and more time on social, pushing more and more data through their feeds. The insights available are beyond anything we've ever been able to access before, the targeting and outreach possibilities are truly great. But the query around ROI will remain until we're able to establish more comprehensive and definitive stats and correlations.
Online platforms are well aware of this, and we're seeing more and more efforts being put into projects that link online activities to offline transactions. Facebook introduced their 'Conversion Lift' metrics earlier this year to help businesses better measure the connection between Facebook ads and in-store sales. Twitter's introduced a similar measure and today, Google's highlighted how they're able to track in-store traffic, and how that data can then be used to improve online marketing performance.
In fact, Google's introducing a new AdWords metric around this, announcing that advertisers will now be able to breakout store visits at a keyword or ad group level, with the capacity to view visits by day, week, or month to better inform bidding and campaign strategy.
"By reviewing data at this level, advertisers can understand which keywords or ad groups drive the most store visits. For example, a toy store may learn that certain dolls or action figures bring in the most visitors. With this insight, that toy store might invest in search terms that drive both online and offline sales, and display those products at the front of their store."
On this, Google has created a new infographic which looks at in-store traffic patterns over the holiday season, using anonymized Location History records. The stats offer some great insight and highlight where offline metrics are headed - and how they can be used to better target and focus online marketing content.