Google really is great; it adds cool features all the time which is absolutely wonderful.
Recently Google added a busy hours feature to Adwords, which is a fantastic way for retailers or small business owners to let their clients know when they are super busy and when their customers should schedule a time to arrive.
Restaurant “rush hour”
But there is a hidden value here: this gives other businesses brilliant business intelligence, as they could find out what their competitors are doing, when they are busy and when they are not and schedule a good time where they could win over their competitors’ audience by offering a better deal when their competitors are busy.
Supermarket tide & low
This could also serve as a proof of concept, as you can learn the busy hours and influx of customers at any given time; when you should close your doors, when you should offer better deals, etc.
With a brilliant mix of SEO, BI, SEM and social media, you can offer deals at the hit of a button to clients looking for a good deal on similar products when your competitors are too busy to give them good service.
You can learn when your competitors close their business or what time they stop answering customers phones to offer your own “special opening hours” and grow your overall profit margin.
Yes, naturally it takes time and not all businesses are actually listed; the ones that are listed, do not necessarily offer any insights, but by cross referencing from their Facebook page, their Google profile and their overall response time, you can surmise what you as a marketer/business owner should do to blow in a competitive market.
Yes, naturally it takes time to gather this intelligence but this isn’t usually out there for the taking any other way.
With this new feature, as a customer you can schedule a good time where there are hardly people at the store/restaurant/cinema or what not but as a business, you know exactly when your competitors can cater to the needs of their clients and are able to offer ways to lure them into your own business, based on aggregated scores scattered around the web on a live basis via Google.
All is fair in love and war!