In retail, we can and should expect that people who are exposed to our messaging, will just come into the store.
The lower the price of the time, the less likely a consumer needs to have a website visit as an intermediate step.
Consider the last time you had fast food or bought something at a chain store after seeing an ad for a special sale. Did you go to their website or were you more likely to look at maps and directions?
I predict that in-store visits and offline conversions will become THE most important metrics we optimize towards.
Further, with robust chat, canvas ads (look at “collection” ads), and other integrations, expect next year to be where people question the ROI of maintaining a website instead of questioning the ROI of social media.
Businesses will find that Facebook and Google already do everything their website was doing and many things a website can’t do.
Local is our future, but tuning websites is a necessary phase to get to local store-driven optimization. You’re hearing this from a guy who has done PPC and SEO for over 15 years and worked at a major search engine.
Facebook and Google (via Google My Business) won’t be ready for at least a year to properly serve mainstream locals.
