Search marketers who have begun to tie in-store visits to search advertising and marketing now have a free tool that compares foot traffic in physical stores. Placed, acquired by Snap in June 2017, has released the free tool Placed Insights to provide marketers with store visit metrics for nearly 2,000 business. 

David Shim, founder and CEO at Placed, sees a couple of opportunities for search marketers. In the planning stage, marketers can research their brand’s offline competitors, and this can help guide keyword strategies. Applying geolocation in search by buying keywords based on radius from the brick-and-mortar store location — as well as attribution by using the same methodology in planning and activation to understand whether this drove an offline store visit, and optimizing — can help, he said. 

The goal is to educate marketers about location data. The tool became available for free on Thursday.

Most consumers are still not comfortable sharing personal information about themselves with brands. In fact, one-third of all consumers are not comfortable with sharing any information about themselves with brands, but 36% are comfortable with sharing their geographic location to improve recommendations, according to the 2018 Adobe Consumer Content Survey.

Some of the data shared in the Placed free tool links one consumer preference with another. For example, the data identifies the restaurants most often frequented by Netflix subscribers. Those who subscribe to Netflix visit In-N-Out 31% more often than those who do not. They visit Chili’s 21% more often, Panda Express about 19% more often, Jimmy John about 13% more often, and Chipotle 10% more often.

The most popular businesses in the U.S. include Walmart — which takes 2.43% of all visits — followed by McDonald’s at 1.73%, Starbucks at 1.11%, Walgreens at 1.01%, Subway at 0.85%, CVS at 0.75%, 7-Eleven at 0.73%, Target at 0.66%, Dollar Tree at 0.63%, and Dollar General at 0.59%.

In another example of the data, Placed used the term Coinbase — an app to buy and sell digital currencies — as a proxy to find consumers who own the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, explains Shim. In this example, Bitcoin owners are 130% more likely to visit a Hyundai dealership than the average person, and 50% more likely to visit Whole Foods, he wrote in an email to Search Insider. 

When targeting search campaigns to a specific geolocation, marketers may want to know that 25% of Whole Foods customers travel more than 13 miles to the nearest store, about 9% further than other grocery stores.

The open-source version of Placed Insights began updating monthly in January 2018.