Facebook to prove online ads lead to offline sales for retailers

For Facebook, the new offerings build on those launched previous year to help businesses with multiple locations create ads for every store within a single campaign.

Meanwhile, Facebook is also preparing the launch of “store visits” – a new metric in Ads Reporting that should help business better understand their store traffic after running local awareness ads. And since not all users leave their Location Services turned on, Facebook will use representative samples from those who do to extrapolate data and estimate what total percentage of an ad’s viewers walked into the advertiser’s store.

The ability to demonstrate exactly how its ads lead to a purchase is likely to give Facebook a huge advantage within the ad tech power game.

The opportunity in offline sales has not been lost on startups either, with a number of them using technology to help stores create better traffic flow and convert online sales into offline sales.

This is the holy grail for convincing brick and mortar advertisers that Facebook is an effective platform to drive in-store business, assuming the data shows their advertising working. When a consumer taps the button, the store locator appears showing a map of all the locations a business has nearby.

Facebook plans to roll out the functionality to advertisers globally in the next few months.

Advertisers now have a way to connect transactions that take place in store or over the phone to their ads.

The new function can be added to any Local Awareness advert and is available now to advertisers.

“This is one of the biggest partner challenges that exist in a digital and mobile world”, Maz Sharafi, Facebook’s director of monetization product marketing, told Ad Week. The function will also advertisers to see real time results as transactions occur instore and over the phone, gain demographic insights into customers and optimise future campaigns as a result.

“From what I’ve seen, this new Offline Conversion API brings Facebook up at least to what Google has been offering, but probably goes beyond it”, he said. A marketer can target a consumer based on her location and then present her with an ad that features a Get Directions button. The new tools are three-fold: a store locator, a store visits tracker and an offline conversions API (an application-programming interface, or a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing software applications and tools). The map will include details about the store, including its hours, address, phone number and travel time to each store.