For the past couple of years, Google’s focus on local search has had some expecting local search traffic to play heightened role for brick-and-mortar retailers this coming holiday. Now, Google is teeing up some new shopping features and reporting capabilities ahead of the holiday shopping season.
The director of product management for online-to-offline solutions, Kishore Kanakamedala mad the announcements on a livestream, which aired at 8:15 a.m. ET from SMX East in New York on Tuesday morning. The livestream included ways for retailers with brick-and-mortar locations to drive and measure more store visits from Google properties.
According to Kanakamedala, mobile is “now the anchor of the customer journey” and cited Google research that showed mobile ads generating 160 percent more incremental store visits compared to desktop and tablet and that local ad efforts, such as local inventory ads, drive an 80 percent higher rate of incremental store visits.
[Read the full news post on Search Engine Land]