Paid media measurement for ByWard Market and Glebe businesses, where the conversion walks through the door
The ByWard Market has been a working public market since the 1820s and the Glebe is a Bank Street shopping district with a stadium in the middle of it, and the businesses on both are overwhelmingly independent shops, restaurants and small hospitality operators. That produces a measurement problem that is the exact inverse of the one in the technology park. Nothing is bought online. The valuable outcome is a person physically arriving, which the digital record cannot see, and the demand is dictated by tourism, weather and an events calendar rather than by anything in an account. On top of that, the media budgets are small enough that the measurement itself has to be cheap or it is not worth doing.
Why ByWard Market and the Glebe is its own case
Start with the honest limit. When the sale happens at a till, the digital trail ends at the click, and every number offered after that point is modelled rather than observed. Store visit metrics are statistical estimates derived from location history for a subset of users, not a count of people, and they cannot be reconciled line by line against a point of sale system. That does not make them useless. It makes them a directional signal to be reported as one, and the reconciliation that does work is coarser and more honest: compare periods, hold the media constant, and look at total revenue rather than trying to match a visit to a receipt.
Then the seasonality, which here is not a curve but a calendar. Demand on these two streets moves with tourist season, festivals, the weather, an event at Lansdowne and whether the canal is open for skating. That has two consequences people get wrong in opposite directions. Month over month comparison is meaningless, because the months are not comparable, so the baseline has to be the same period last year or nothing. And automated bidding trained on a rolling average will consistently underbid the day demand actually arrives, because the pattern is event driven rather than smooth, which is an argument for planning budget against a known calendar rather than trusting the average.
Finally the proportion question, which is the one most likely to be answered dishonestly by somebody selling a service. For a single storefront spending a modest monthly budget, the correct amount of measurement infrastructure is small. A warehouse is not appropriate. A monthly retainer is usually not appropriate either. A one-time audit that fixes the account structure, the conversion actions and the tracking, and hands over a written plan, is proportionate. Kodelytics is a one-person firm and says no to work that does not fit, and that is the shape this street usually needs.
The work, as it applies here
Google Ads account audit
A fixed-scope look at an account running on a small budget, where the usual findings are too many campaigns splitting the data too thinly to ever learn, geography set wider than the customer base, and conversion actions counting things that are not sales.
GA4 & GTM implementation
The minimum instrumentation that a walk-in business actually benefits from: direction requests, calls from the site, menu or hours views, and the booking tool if there is one, tracked properly across the hostname it lives on rather than guessed at.
Conversion attribution audit
Establishing what can honestly be claimed when the sale happens at a counter, which usually means reporting a small number of observed actions plainly and retiring the modelled figures that were being presented as counts.
FAQ: ByWard Market and the Glebe
We are one store on Bank Street. Do we need any of this?
Probably not as an ongoing engagement, and it is worth saying that plainly rather than selling you a retainer. One location with a modest monthly budget usually needs a single pass over the account and the tracking, a corrected set of conversion actions, and a written plan somebody local can run. What it does not need is a data warehouse, a custom dashboard or a standing monthly fee. If a proposal you have been sent includes those for a single storefront, ask what decision each one is supposed to inform.
Google reports store visits. Can we reconcile that against the till?
No, and any process that appears to is matching two things that are not the same population. Store visit figures are modelled estimates built from location history for the users who have it enabled, then extrapolated, so they are a directional trend rather than a headcount. Use them to compare one period against another under similar conditions, and use total revenue over a matched period as the actual outcome measure. Reporting a modelled estimate as though it were a count is how a report loses the room the first time somebody checks.
Our best weeks are set by the weather and the events calendar. How do we compare anything?
Against the same weeks last year, and never against last month. In a business driven by tourism, festivals and event nights, consecutive months are not comparable units, so a month over month chart mostly measures the calendar. Keep a written record of what was on during each period, because the explanation for a spike is usually an event rather than a campaign change, and a year later nobody remembers. That log is the single cheapest piece of measurement infrastructure a seasonal business can maintain.
Is the Google Business Profile more important than our website for a walk-in business?
For a lot of these queries it is the surface that gets seen, because a nearby search shows the profile before it shows anyone’s home page, and the hours, the photos and the location are what the person is checking. That does not make the website optional, since it is where a menu, a booking tool or an event listing lives and where you own the data. Treat the profile as a real landing page: accurate hours including holidays, correct categories, and a link that goes to something useful rather than to a generic home page.
We spend under two thousand dollars a month. What account structure survives that budget?
A deliberately small one. The most common failure on a small budget is an account split into a dozen campaigns and forty ad groups because that is how a large account is organised, which spreads the data so thin that nothing ever accumulates enough conversions to learn from. Fewer campaigns, tight geography, and a single clear conversion action produce a system that can actually improve. Structure is a way of allocating budget and learning, and if the budget cannot fill the structure, the structure is wrong.
Every proposal we get talks about reviews. Is that measurement or marketing?
It is neither, from this firm’s point of view, and that is worth being direct about. Kodelytics does not do reputation work, review solicitation or content programs, and it does not sub the work out. Reviews genuinely do matter for how a business surfaces on the maps results, so it is a real thing to spend attention on, but it belongs with your own team or with an agency that does it openly. What is in scope here is making sure the tracking, the account structure and the reporting underneath all of that are correct.
Reading that applies
Also covered by this page
These 23 places raise the same questions as ByWard Market and the Glebe and are answered here rather than on a page of their own. Every one of them is inside the City of Ottawa.
- Britannia
- Lincoln Heights
- Carlingwood
- McKellar Park
- Highland Park
- Woodroffe
- Island Park
- Champlain Park
- Mechanicsville
- Civic Hospital
- Wellington Village
- Little Italy
- Chinatown
- Dow's Lake
- Glebe Annex
- Lowertown
- Old Ottawa East
- Rideau Gardens
- Billings Bridge
- Mooney's Bay
- Westboro
- Hintonburg
- Old Ottawa South
Kodelytics Inc. works remotely from one address in Kanata and has no office, phone line or staff in ByWard Market and the Glebe. This page describes how the work applies to businesses there, and claims nothing else.