One of the difficulties in the SEO and Pay Per Click world is measuring conversions that don’t take place directly online.  For example, if you run an online store that sells your products directly online, it is easy to measure results, see which keywords trigger the most purchases, find out which advertisers give you the best sales figure per advertising dollar, etc. For those businesses that don’t have that direct sale link online, it is much more difficult and it is hard to measure your success other than with generalities.  Since we started advertising, sales are up, etc.

Well Google has come out with a metric to try to address this issue.  They have a metric to estimate store visits as it relates to site visits.  Though I’m not sure how effective this will be now, it is a first step at using big data to tackle this issue and share what we learn with smaller businesses.  Searchengineland does a nice article on it here. We will learn over time how accurate this is, and often the first version of any of Google’s new tools have some bugs in it.  The new mobile friendly tool gave me opposite readings on the same page the first day it came out.  However, I applaud this first step and look forward to what we learn and can develop from it down the road that can help some of these businesses get better metrics on what kind of sales and new clients are coming in due to their website presence.   Seems like we’ve been stuck on the “How did you hear about us?” question for years when it comes to this.  Nice to take a step forward, even if we need to view with some trepidation in the early days.

Summary
Article Name
Google Tackling Site to Store Conversions
Google Certified Partner and SEM Specialist
One of the difficulties in the SEO and Pay Per Click world is measuring conversions that don't take place directly online. Google has come out with a metric to try to address this issue.
Jeremy Skillings