Do you know exactly how much foot traffic is being driven to your stores by Google? If you have one store the answer is probably yes. That’s because finding the information is as easy as going to your Google My Business account and looking at the Insights for your store and you’ll see requests for driving directions and Google Maps searches for the last 7, 30, or 90 days. Simple.
What happens however when you have 5 stores? 50? 500? Chances are that no one in your organization is sitting there loading page after page for each location and copy-pasting the data into a spreadsheet to get the answer. So if your company is a chain or franchise of any size then the likely answer is youreally don’t know.
This poses a real problem. Without good data how can you calculate the value of Google for your business? How do you make informed decisions regarding priorities? Are you better off diverting funds and manpower from other tasks to clean up Google? Worse still, what trends are you not seeing that could give you valuable information about which marketing activities, sales, or communications strategies to use?
The missing piece - Company wide Insights
With the release of version 3.2 of Google’s Google My Business API it has finally become possible to see insights on a company wide basis by aggregating data from the individual locations as well as benchmarking the individual locations based on which perform better, and why! In addition, Google made it possible to gather up to 18 month’s worth of data, making long term trend analysis on a company wide or individual store level possible. What this means is that for the first time companies can see online to offline foot traffic without having to resort to a special campaign, offer, or other tracking solution.
PinMeTo has now released one of the world’s first company wide Google My Business Insights tools to their clients. These new insights coupled with our publishing and monitoring tools now give companies a clear view of historical totals, highest performing locations in terms of multiple factors, and trend analysis in the form of activity graphs. Now our clients can not only ensure that their customers always find the correct opening hours, address, or telephone number, they can see how many times those actions occur. Below is real world data for one of PinMeTo’s apparel clients showing the last 90 days of Google activity.
What is immediately startling about the data is the sheer volume. In this case there were 24.8 million Google Maps views of their 190 stores and 1.2 million requests for driving directions to stores in only 90 days! That’s over 1,450 Google Maps views for each location per day and 13,333 requests for driving directions every single day!
Trends - Using data to know where and when to engage
In addition to cumulative data, PinMeTo will soon offer trend graphs* showing data for direct and indirect search, request for phone number, request for driving directions, and Google Maps views with up to 18 months worth of historic data. These trend graphs give valuable insight into customer activity making the planning of marketing activities and even what sort of content there should be much more relevant and effective. Below are a series of examples of historical trends for various market segments that demonstrate exactly when customer activity spikes, allowing for robust and detailed analysis of customer behavior and planning of communications and marketing strategies.
See if you can decide which sort of company is represented below just looking at the data trends. The answers will be in the captions.
Everyone is aware of New Year’s resolutions and it's not uncommon for people to prioritize health as a goal and here is the evidence. It is also a strong indicator that late November / early December may be a great time to push ad campaigns at the local level because the searches are spiking for directions to local gyms.
Once again the data above clarifies value more than it reveals surprises. In this case a company could consider whether adding outdoor seating to more venues would be a worthwhile investment based on increases in summer foot traffic at venues that already have outdoor seating.
The data above supports the idea that customers on vacation are using mapping services to find a gas station brand that they trust. This could lead the brand to capitalize on customers visiting new locations with a check in campaign or a photo contest to take advantage of customers vacation pictures to drive organic views across social media.
The spikes in website visits and requests for driving directions ahead of major holidays could influence this home improvement chain to push offers and deals on social media as well as advertise locally since customers are searching for local stores.
Finally this grocery store can take historic data about spikes in customer activity ahead of major holidays to drive marketing activities at specific times to really take advantage of existing behavior. Holiday specials, flyers, social media campaigns, or other marketing ahead of these spikes could drive sales even higher.
*Trends are currently in a Beta stage
PinMeTo - Trust your data, understand your customers
For chains and multi location brands there has never been a better time to take ownership of your online presence and with PinMeTo and Google’s new API you can finally have control, monitoring, and insights for your entire company in one place. Finally you can know for certain how your company performs on Google as a whole and at the individual store level and feel confident that the branding and information that your customers find is correct and up to date. With more control and better insights at your fingertips the question is no longer can you afford to prioritize Google, but can you afford not to?
