b'Associate News Malte Lange and Chris Melnychuk Co-founders, Minoa Inc.DRIVING FOOTTRAFFIC with Google Maps: A Look at the WPMAAs more people turn to their phonesto find what they want and need around them (especially through Google Maps), brick-and-mortar businesses find themselves competing for prime real estate in both physical and digital worlds. The best real estate a business can have on Google Maps is a spot in the so-called map pack, or top three Google Maps search results. This concept resembles Search Engine Optimization (SEO) commonly employed for website searching and can be opti-mized in a similar way. Marketing studies show that top-ranked results for unbranded terms (e.g. convenience store) in the map pack have an 11% click-through rate compared to less than 1% for non-map pack results. In this article we find that top c-store brands can realize hun-dreds of thousands of dollars per state in organic reach value on Google Maps by performing well in the map pack. We also find that performance is heavily keyword-dependent, so ranking is very much a strategy game that you can win.Performance Pays Off:Convenience Store PerformanceFor our analysis we sampled 100 random points in each state and searched for Convenience Store near me. Across all locations we tallied how often a brand name was featured in the map pack relative to how often they were in the vicinity of the sampled point. In this way, chain performance is only evalu-ated against competitors in their specific geogra-phies of operation. We also estimated the monetary value of this performance by calculating the cost to achieve similar reach through paid Google Maps ads, referring to this as the value of organic reach. To calculate this value, we estimated the number of people who searched for c-stores on Google Maps based on population and tourist data for each state, and a CSN statistic on the frequency of c-store vis-its. We then multiplied the number of Google Maps c-store searchers by the $2 cost-per-click of Google Maps ad space.WPMA News / Winter 202361'