Grocery stores

This case study uses PinMeTo’s primary data to examine how consumer grocery store shopping habits are changing and how grocery chains can adapt, using PinMeTo customers as examples.

It doesn’t get much more local than your neighborhood grocery store. It’s a business model that’s stayed constant: they gather food and supplies for people to buy. But the way we interact with grocery stores has changed over time – and is still changing.

Customers look online before shopping offline

Using PinMeTo data collected from five major grocery store chains in Scandinavia, we compared the annual before vs after PinMeTo results from 2018 to 2019. There were increases in all types of searches and actions:

The data shows that more and more people are going online to find grocery stores, which they’ll then visit in person. Location is key: potential customers are looking for grocery stores nearby.

An important indicator of this is the “Discovery” type of search, which happens when someone searches for a general business category, which, in our grocery store example, could mean searches like “grocery store near me.” The data shows that Discovery searches increased by 382% from 2018 to 2019.

If someone is looking to go to a grocery store, but they don’t already have one in mind, they’re very likely to be making a purchase soon. That’s why it’s so important to show up in local searches. The effort you need to make at that point, to convert someone from prospect to customer, is simple and straightforward: you just have to be there and be open as advertised.

Björn Handell, a location marketing specialist at PinMeTo.

PinMeTo helps you be visible in search
Making sure business information like hours, address, and phone number is accurate at every location is the first step toward becoming more visible in local search results.

A service like PinMeTo’s Listings will make sure that the information is accurate at each location, across multiple search and social platforms – and will ensure that it’s easy to update that information.

Using PinMeTo data, we looked at the Google results appearances and actions for those same five Scandinavian grocery store chains – all of which use PinMeTo’s Listings – comparing the six months before they began using Listings to the six months after:

If we look again at the Discovery search results, we see an increase of 133%, meaning that 133% more people who searched for “grocery store” – and were highly likely to make a purchase soon – were seeing these particular grocery stores in their search results.

Our data can’t show whether these people went to those stores and made purchases after, but it doesn’t take much imagination to picture that happening – and a 2019 report claimed that 71% of grocery store shoppers spent more than $50 per visit!