I know Google Analytics (GA) has had it's Map Overlay function for sometime now, a report in GA which shows geographically where your online traffic comes from. Recently though I've had a degree of exposure to the retail sector as opposed to just the financial sector. With this particular brand it was interesting to see how the online traffic so accurately matched up with the branch locations. See image below, on the left is GA map overlay report for the brand and on the right you see its store locations. An incredibly obvious relationship appears between online activity and store location illustrating in retail how branch locality drives online brand awareness.
This kind of thing just doesn't happen in the financial sector where online traffic bears no immediate correlation with the offline world and the companies branches.
Obviously though when there is a match there's a geotargeting opportunity if you chose to act upon that information. This is obviously taken to a higher level with augmented reality applications in the mobile world where there are great marketing opportunities when GPS technology meets the highstreet retail opportunity. I will cover this in more detail in a later post.
*I've been privileged to get access to the web analytics of a retail brand lately. In a brief series I will cover insights I've found between the retail world and the financial sector where I specialize as an online optimization expert
