At the Google Marketing Next conference, Google is announcing some major upgrades to the tools it makes available to marketers. The company is updating its store visit measurement tools and is introducing a dash of machine learning into the mix.
The company has been measuring store visits brought about by online advertisements as early as 2014. It is important as well, since it gives marketers a common bridge between their online and offline efforts, and lets them gauge the exact impact of the said efforts. After all, it is easy to run a marketing campaign and gauge the results when your company is based online. However, what happens when you run a brick and mortar store that is still doing ads online?
In comes Google. The company is fairly an expert in using all sorts of data points from your smartphones to gauge store visits. This includes things like Wi-Fi, location and mapping. Now, Google is looking to improve things yet another notch by bringing greater machine learning into play.
According to Google, the company has managed to measure 5 billion store visits in merely 3 years. That is a huge number and ML has already had a big role to play in the same. By feeding all the data it has generated to a machine learning model, Google hopes to get even more accurate — particularly in situations like multi-story malls with a lot of shops, that sometimes mess with the accuracy of its systems.
Finally, the company is expanding the reach of its campaign and will also include YouTube TrueView in its compatible campaigns. It will also push store sales management at a very fundamental level — including at the device level itself, and will also integrate the point of sale data into adwords to give marketers concrete data upon how many of those visits actually turned out to be fruitful.
Well, the reach Google has built in almost every niche is coming in handy now. And the company will be certain to use it to provide marketers with better, more accurate data.
