Google has been releasing a host of updates and features for marketers and consumers leading up to the holiday season.
Its latest offering will give advertisers a better idea of what's driving people into their stores. On Tuesday the search giant said it will start showing advertisers which keywords people searched for before clicking on the brand's search ad and eventually ended up in one of the brand's brick-and-mortar locations. The information is aggregated and anonymized, so advertisers won't be able to see which individuals clicked on their ads before entering a store.
But Google will give those same advertisers a better idea of when people are in their stores by now reporting store-visit figures by month, week, day and hour. That means a consumer-electronics retailer might be able to see that the people visiting their stores on a weekday morning are typically looking for phone chargers because that's what a lot of those visitors searched for before coming in, and the retailer might decide to stock its phone chargers further back in a store at those times in order to get the people to see more of the store's products before checking out.