Google Ads adds a local toggle and store sales in Data Manager

Google Ads added two features for companies with physical shops on 8 September. Ginny Marvin, who speaks for Google Ads, announced both. One sends campaign money to people who are already near a shop. The other pulls sales from the till into the ad account.

Local Customer Optimization moves budget to buyers near the shop

The first feature is a switch inside Performance Max campaigns that use store goals. Performance Max is the Google campaign type that buys across all its services at once. With the switch on, the campaign spends more on people who are close by and look ready to walk in. Google says those ads run in Maps, in Waze and in local results in Search.

There are limits. The switch does not work with campaigns set up for online sales. It also does not work in a Performance Max campaign linked to a Merchant Center product feed. A shop that wants it needs a separate campaign built around store goals.

Store Sales in Data Manager links till receipts to earlier ad clicks

The second feature lets an advertiser connect a customer database or a Google Sheet straight to Data Manager. Google then tries to match a purchase made in the shop with an ad the same person saw or clicked before. The result feeds reports and Smart Bidding, the automatic bidding that decides what each auction is worth.

Access is not open to everyone. Google limits it to advertisers on its list. Customer details such as emails and phone numbers have to be scrambled with SHA-256 before they are sent. Google suggests uploading transactions every day or every week, and wants 30 days of history before it reports a value per sale.

Marvin ties both launches to the holiday rush

Marvin said the two features “unite real-time navigation signals on the front end with seamless offline revenue measurement”. Local Customer Optimization is available now and still rolling out. Store Sales in Data Manager is due in the coming weeks, with the start expected at the end of September.

For a marketer the harder part is the data, not the switch. The switch takes a minute to turn on. Matching receipts to ads needs clean customer records and someone who will upload the file every week. Shops have been buying this kind of proof from retail media networks for a while, as Ace Hardware showed with its weather-triggered retail media and as the Toom rollout across more than 300 Rewe Group stores showed in Germany. Google now offers it inside the ad account. It is worth agreeing who owns the sales file before the season starts.