Facebook Introduces New Ways To Increase And Measure Store Visits And In-Store Sales

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A big challenge for local brick-and-mortar businesses these days, is how to measure how their online ad campaigns affect offline actions such as shop visits and in-store sales. To help them, Facebook has announced three solutions for businesses to drive those objectives, and to measure them effectively.

Mobile is really changing the ways in which businesses are approaching the divide between the real world and digital. Users navigate digital mostly through mobile these days. People use their mobile in 45% of all shopping journeys, but 90% of sales happen in-store.

Shop Locator

Shop Locator was created to help people find a business. To compliment all the other Local Awareness solutions, especially for businesses with multiple locations, Facebook is now launching “a native shop locator to help people find and navigate to the nearest shop location”. This can be added to any Local Awareness Ad.

Facebook’s Shop Locator can be added to Local Awareness Ads, helping people find shop locations

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Shop Visits

Shop visits is a new metric that allows advertisers to better understand how their shop traffic or in-store sales are being impacted by their Facebook ads. Advertisers user the shop visits metric to:

See how many people come to their shop after seeing a Facebook campaign.
Optimise advert creative, delivery and targeting based on shop visits.
Analyse results across shops and regions to plan and optimise future campaigns.

Shop visits is a new Facebook Ads metric allowing advertisers to connect offline sales to ads

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In a Facebook for Business post, the company explained that

[quote]Shop visits is an estimated metric based on information from people with location services enabled on their phone. The metric will be rolled out to advertisers globally over the coming months.[/quote]

Offline Conversions API

Up until now it was hard to figure out which transactions in-store or by phone came from their Facebook adverts. The offline conversions API allows advertisers on Facebook to “match transaction data from their customer database or point-of-sale system to adverts reporting”. This way, they can understand the effectiveness of their ads straight away.

Facebook’s offline conversions API allows advertisers to match transactions to their database

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To connect, advertisers can work with IBM, Index, Invoca, Lightspeed, LiveRamp, Marketo, Square, or directly with Facebook.

With the offline conversions API, advertisers can

[quote]see real-time results as transactions occur in store and over the phone, gain demographic insights about people who purchase, as well as optimise future campaigns”[/quote]

Store locator for local awareness ads
A demo of the new store locator feature for local awareness ads.
Posted by Facebook Business on Tuesday, June 14, 2016