A study by Google and Temasek revealed that 6.7% of all retail sales is expected to be done via e-commerce channels by 2025. What is significant about this data is that offline or storefront sales will continue to dominate retail sales for a foreseeable future.
At the same time, retailers recognize the importance of smartphone as a channel for engaging customers. According to Hootsuite-wearesocial data, there are 8.44 million mobile subscribers in a city with a population of 5.74 million. The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) pegs wireless broadband penetration at 206.7% as of June 2017.
According to eMarketer, Google and Facebook dominate the digital advertising space accounting for over 60% of ad spending. Both have developed solutions to allow advertisers to measure conversion that happen offline.
This September, Singapore has become only the third country in Asia Pacific, after Japan and Australia, to have available Google’s store visits measurement, a technology designed to help businesses understand the offline effects of their online advertising campaigns.
When people are trying to find a local business, they often turn to Google for help. According to Google nearly one-third of all mobile searches are related to location. To help consumers decide where to go, marketers are using innovations like location extensions and local inventory ads to promote nearby stores.
Store visits measurement was first introduced in 2014 to give advertisers deeper insight into consumer journeys that start online and end in a physical business location. Google claims that in a span of three years advertisers around the world have measured over 5 billion store visits using AdWords.
Google has combined its mapping and proprietary machine learning technology to help businesses measure store visits with the highest degree of precision and accuracy. Store visits are calculated based on aggregated and anonymized data from users who opt in to activate Location History.
Store visits measurement is currently available for Search, Shopping and Display campaigns. Soon, this technology will also be available for YouTube TrueView campaigns to help retailers measure the impact of video ads on foot traffic to physical stores.
Stephanie Davis, Country Director, Google Singapore said, ‘Bridging the gap between the online and offline worlds is a crucial step for retailers to understand the full value of their digital investments. But it’s not an easy task. Starting from today, businesses in Singapore can use Google’s industry-leading technology to accurately measure the impact of their online advertising campaigns on in-store sales.’
In an exclusive interview with Retail Tech Innovation (see video below), Leonie Valentine, managing director, sales and operation for Google Hong Kong says there is not enough of a joined up view of how they can use analytics and data in retailers’ businesses.
She acknowledges that retailers desire to know more about how customers are searching for products in stores, but there remains a limited organizational capability to be able to find all that data about their customers, make sense of it and interrogate it.