Retail
Google Ads for Ottawa retail stores and boutiques
When somebody searches the thing you sell, they are choosing between your shop and a warehouse.
Retail has a hard question attached to every product search: the searcher can buy the same item from a warehouse and have it delivered tomorrow. What a shop sells instead is being able to see it today, ask questions, get it right the first time, and walk out with it.
Local search is where that argument gets made. Somebody searching for a specific brand, size or model in your area is a person who wants to touch the thing before buying it.
Where retail campaigns lose money
Broad category searches with no local intent
A general search for a category goes to whichever national listing is cheapest. Ads work far better on brand, size and model searches, with the shop's location and stock behind them.
Ads that say nothing about stock
In stock, come and see it beats a paragraph about quality every time, because the real question in a shop searcher's mind is whether the trip is worth making.
Everything pointed at one page
People searching for a specific product want that product, its sizes and whether it is on the shelf. A general shop page makes them browse, and browsing is what their phone is already good at.
No measurement of what the ads produced
In-store sales are hard to attribute, so they get ignored. Calls, direction taps, click-to-call and online orders are all measurable, and together they show which products are worth advertising.
What your customers search for
What shoppers in Ottawa type before they leave the house:
- running shoes near me
- diamond rings Ottawa
- kids snowsuit in stock
- bike shop Kanata
- record store downtown Ottawa
- where to buy a standing desk
- gift shop near me
- hobby shop Orleans
How we track the leads that come in
Retail leads are messier than most, and we would rather say so than invent an attribution model. For a shop that sells in store only, the measurable leads are calls and click-to-call, enquiries by form or text, and taps for directions, and those are what the weekly report counts.
Where you also sell online, orders are tracked like any other ecommerce conversion and kept separate from the in-store leads. Where your point of sale can record it, a sale tied to a phone enquiry can be fed back, so the report shows which products produced calls that turned into sales rather than which products got the most clicks.
- Calls and click-to-call credited to the search that produced them.
- Form and text enquiries logged as leads.
- Direction taps counted separately from calls.
- Online orders tracked apart from in-store leads.
- The report also lists the searches that produced those leads, which is often the most useful page in it: it shows which products and brands people look for before they come in, and which ones they assume you do not carry. For a shop deciding what to advertise next month, that is the most actionable part of the whole report.
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