The ability to track digital efforts to in-store visits can be the single most difficult challenge a local business conquers.
Since the beginning of time (local search time), marketers have been working to find opportunities to understand how digital efforts drive in-store visits. The challenge we marketers face is that if we are not paying for advertising, it is difficult to uncover ROI and make a case for investing in local search optimization.
Proving value of local listing optimization efforts for a brick-and-mortar location is really limited to the boundaries that are already established. These boundaries include access to solely what is offered within the Google My Business (GMB) platform, Bing Places, Yext, MozLocal and other local listing platforms we use to gauge performance and analytics. Rarely within these platforms are we able to measure the impact that optimizing a local listing had on delivering a monetary, in-store conversion.
However, just recently, Yext announced a partnership with Uber that will set a road map to break these digital to in-store-visit acquisition challenges we battle every day. This partnership will allow for an entirely new way to track the value of in-store visits by way of local search engine optimization.
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