It’s a popular misconception that online advertising is strictly for businesses who conduct at least some of their sales online. In reality, online search ads do a great job of driving offline in-store sales too.

Google Search Marketing Manager Susan Billingsley posted a video on the company’s Small Business Blog this week that illustrates the results of “Online to Store Experiments” conducted with an outside firm to quantify just how well online advertising can benefit sales for a traditional brick and mortar business. Some of the statistics may surprise you:

• Test stores for one large advertiser running search ads on generic keywords saw an increase of 1.7% on new in-store conversions along with positive returns on ad spending.
• A national retailer targeting 59 test markets with online ads containing keywords which were specific to one particular product category, and experienced a 2% lift on in-store sales. Stores who were generally underperformers in the advertised category saw a better-than-average increase of 5.3% along with a $3 return for every dollar spent on the search ads.
• Another retailer experienced a 3.6% increase on in-store sales for one product category after running online ads featuring a single keyword for that targeted category. Other categories which were not targeted still saw a 1% lift that was attributed to the online ad. That company saw a $10 return for each $1 spent on the ads.
• Online coupons provided a 2.5% in-store sales increase for promoted categories, along with a 1.6% in-store sales lift overall. The method was found to be at least as equally effective for offline sales as traditional paper ad circulars.

So even if you don’t have an online store, internet search advertising can still be quite beneficial and cost effective for your business.

If you’d like to learn more about online advertising, but don’t know where to start, GannettLocal can help! Contact Us today.