Facebook Launches New Tools for Businesses with a Physical Location
June 14, 2016
Businesses with physical locations have been challenged when trying to measure the success of their advertising campaigns and the impact on store visits and sales.
Today, Facebook announced “new solutions for businesses to drive people to their stores and measure the amount of store visits and in-store sales following their Facebook mobile ad campaigns.” (FB for Business)
While 90% of retail sales take place in the store, 45% of people use mobile while shopping. (FB for Business) This blurs the line between the physical and digital worlds and makes it hard to gauge online efforts with offline sales and store visits.
Facebook has launched 3 new features to help businesses determine the success of their Ad Campaigns:
- Providing a location finder right in an ad set.
- A new measurement tool to track in-store visits.
- A new measurement tool to track in-store sales.
Find a Location Near Me
Today Facebook has launched a “native store locator,” which aims to help people find the nearest store location within the ad format.
Local awareness ads bring people to a physical location. These ads can now provide a “Get Directions” call-to-action so people can find the store that is nearest to them, without leaving the ad or app.
Previously, local awareness ads had the capability for businesses to create ads for each of their locations within one single campaign. Now they can create one set of ads, which can have the capability of allowing people to find the location nearest to them right in the ad.
Often, locating a store via a business’ website can be frustrating, requiring many taps on maps or links or entering an address or zip code. The new store locator allows people to easily and quickly find a location via mobile without leaving the ad.
This store locator can be added to any local awareness ad and is available to anyone advertising. (FB for Business)
Measure Foot Traffic to Your Store
In the past, effectively measuring how ads impact visits to a store location was difficult. Facebook has solved this problem with store visits, “a new metric in Ads Reporting.” (FB for Business)
Advertisers can now easily see the impact on store traffic after running local awareness ads. This provides a more complete picture of the impact of the ad campaign.
With store visits, businesses can now:
- Track how many people came to your location after seeing a Facebook Ad Campaign.
- Optimize the ad’s delivery and targeting based on store visits.
- Measure results across multiple locations and regions, allowing better optimization for future campaigns.
Burger King, Petco, E.Leclerc, Cadillac and a few other businesses have been using store visits to measure and understand foot traffic to their locations after they have run local awareness ads.
“French retailer E.Leclerc was able to reach 1.5 million people within 10 kilometers of their stores and found that approximately 12% of clicks on their ad were followed by a visit to store within 7 days.” (FB for Business)
Offline Sales Measurement
Advertisers can now make the connection between transactions in the store or over the phone directly to their advertising efforts.
“The Offline Conversions API allows businesses to match transaction data from their customer database or point-of-sale system to Ads Reporting, helping them better understand the effectiveness of their ads in real-time. Businesses can work with partners such as IBM, Index, Invoca, Lightspeed, LiveRamp, Marketo and Square or with Facebook directly.” (FB for Business)
The Offline Conversions API allows advertisers to:
- See real-time results, as the transactions happen in the location or on the phone.
- Gather demographics and data on the people making purchases.
- Understand how to better optimize campaigns in the future based on purchasing habits and data gathered.
Increase Foot Traffic and Sales
These new features will help businesses measure their efforts. The data will then give them “more power and information to improve campaign performance.” (FB for Business)
See what businesses using these new features have to say and learn more about how it works on the Facebook for Business Blog.
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