I was recently sent the following article by a colleague of mine that describes in lots of detail the dynamic Google is facing whereby people search on Google, click on text ads and then somehow end up buying in a physical store. Check out the article here. 
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I’m a huge advocate of cross-channel marketing and believer that the internet does a better job driving in-store purchasing behavior than it does for online purchases in many cases. This article talks about how Google understands this dynamic and is focused on small merchants as a way to drive sales into their physical stores. The problem is that in most cases, nobody knows the actual sales that result from Google searches in-store. There no tracking right now to show the magnitude of this impact. 
We’re applying our in-store tracking technology to a variety of initiatives and are exploring how to track search marketing (and specific keywords) on in-store sales. Pretty cool stuff. I felt this article was speaking to a lot of what we’re focused on at RevTrax given we’re all about tracking online ads to in-store sales. Anyway, check out the article to get a good feel for what the market is talking about regarding offline purchase transactions. Pretty interesting stuff…
