Case Study

Fuel Stations & Convenience Stores Retail (Middle East)

The Desire

A large GCC based Fuel Station Retailer needed to digitally transform their retail location network to ensure their mobile ﬁrst customer base and potential customer base were able to digitally engage with each retail location.

Fuel Stations & Convenience Stores Retail (Middle East)

Website
Traffic

Direction
Request

Google Search Discovery

Google Maps Discovery

Total Google Searches

The Challenge

With more than 220 locations and 100 convenience stores the brand owners were faced with no ownership access to any of their Google Maps locations. Either the locations ownership had been claimed by someone else, and they didn’t know who that was or the locations were yet to have their Google ownership claimed, a daunting task for retail marketing professionals whose expertise is not in digital location management, optimization, business listing compilation and geocoding. Plus having to deal with Google Support is a major frustration. They also were at the mercy of Local Guide suggested edit and worse, location tampering by their competitors.

They urgently needed to:

Claim their Google Maps locations primary ownership and assemble it in one location group.
Publishing new locations on Google Maps on or before the opening date.
They needed to organize all their locations with consistent location business names and store codes.
Update all their location addresses, geocodes and map pin locations.
Update all operating hours.
Identify what services are available at each location.
Add company branding to each location like the related brand logos.
Start engaging with their customers by responding to the Google reviews that were being written by happy and unhappy customers.

The Solution

The Local Knowledge team of digital location management specialists led by the director of operations was contracted to take over the entire digital location ownership claiming & management process on the brand owner’s behalf.

Updated and compiled an Arabic/English complete location network dataset of all the location speciﬁc attributes, products and services.
Manually veriﬁed and updated geocodes and granular addressing.
Successfully worked directly with Google Maps support to bulk verify the entire location group of Google Maps listings and provide Primary Ownership for all Google Maps locations under one Google location group to the brand owner.
Along with Google Maps management, the locations were syndicated and updated on Apple Maps, Siri, Here Maps, Foursquare, WhatsApp, TomTom Maps, THTC Maps, Yandex Maps, and Waze.
Provide a centralized dashboard where all Google reviews were consolidated and either responded to manually or automatically.
Provide an ability to measure the results of digital location management engagement through automated reporting to the stakeholders or logging directly into the digital location management dashboard.
The removal of fake locations as well as merging and removal of duplicated Google Maps locations.

The Results

The Google Maps Insights and Performance Metrics API provides an abundance of customer insights on how locations are discovered as well actual customer actions.

34% increase in click to navigate over a 2-year period.
70% increase in total Google Searches over a 2-year period.
An incredible 127% increase in discovery search (this is looking for a product or a service not the brand name) over a 2-year period.
Location syndication and management to over 10 digital mapping, online directory, in vehicle navigation, messaging and mobile app platforms to ensure brand location discovery is on all devices and platforms.

March 2019 to March 2020 to March 2021 Google Maps/Google Search/ Google My Business Insights

The Conclusion

With every measurable indicator showing growth and customer engagement, the outsourced digital location management program delivered on all fronts. The retail location visibility on Google and the other platforms signiﬁcantly improved and with-it customer actions and engagements.

2 Years of Digital Location Management

Website
Traffic

Direction
Requests

Telephone
Calls

Customer Actions on Google Maps

Google Search
Discovery

Google Maps
Discovery

Total Google
Searches

Search Insights On Google Search/Maps

Schedule a Meeting with the Local Knowledge Team

We'd be happy to prepare a digital location management presentation based on your current locations on Google Maps and other digital presence platforms

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