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Facebook’s new store locator feature in its Local Awareness advertising product. (Courtesy of Facebook)
Brick-and-mortar businesses have struggled for years to measure how digital advertising campaigns truly impact sales and visits to their stores.
On Tuesday, Facebook launched several new advertising features within its “Local Awareness” ad product to help companies solve this problem. First, Facebook is making a store locator available within any ”Local Awareness” ad to help shoppers identify and travel to the nearest physical store. Facebook is also expanding the metrics offered in its Ads Reporting tab to include ”store visits” to help businesses track foot traffic driven by Local Awareness ads. And last, Facebook is offering advertisers an “Offline Conversions API” to help them see how the ads impact sales, in store or by phone.
“Online to offline attribution is a fundamental challenge retailers have had since the beginning of online advertising,” said Facebook’s director of monetization product marketing Maz Sharafi.”We can close the loop for businesses at scale. The tools we have for businesses make Facebook the best place in mobile to drive people to stores and drive real business results.”
“It’s been met with great appetite,” Sharafi added.
More than 90% of retail sales still take place in stores, according to eMarketer, which suggests Facebook’s new tools could meaningfully boost its already robust advertising business. In Facebook’s most recently reported first quarter, the company had revenue of $5.38 billion, a 51% increase from the same period a year ago. More than 80% of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes from mobile.
“This is the first time we’re comprehensively closing the loop for retailers,” said Facebook product manager Sam England. “Businesses can see the real offline reaction to their advertising. It’s an incredibly scalable product.”
The store locator tool can be added to any Local Awareness ad and is now available to all advertisers. ”Store visits” will roll out to advertisers globally over the coming months, and Facebook is currently testing the offline conversions metric across ad formats.
The tools highlight Facebook’s competition with advertising giant Google, which already measures store visits. Google also runs mobile search ads featuring businesses and plans to place ads in Google Maps. Local Awareness ads first rolled out in 2014 and allow businesses, whether they have a single store or thousands of locations, to show Facebook users the stores that are closest to them and include call-to-action buttons like “Get Directions” to encourage shopping. Last year, Facebook added new features to the product that make it possible for businesses with multiple locations to create targeted ads for every store within a single campaign.
The store locator tool is built specifically for mobile and is intended to minimize taps. The locator shows a map of all of the locations a business has nearby. Without leaving the ad or Facebook’s app, users can see the address, hours, phone number, website and estimated travel time for each store.
“Local awareness ads allow us to show people relevant products and offers at the Tesco stores convenient to them, which is key to delivering on the promise of ‘helpfulness’,” said Alicia Howard, head of social media and digital content at retailer Tesco, which has used the new store locator feature. “The store locator functionality builds on this capability and stands out as a great example of how advertising formats can adapt to how people are using their mobile devices.”
“Store visits” are an estimated metric based on data from users who have enabled location services on their phones, Facebook said. “Store visits” shows businesses, for individual or multiple stores, how many people came to their store after seeing a Facebook campaign and helps marketers adjust their ad creative and targeting based on the results. One advertiser who has used “Store visits” in a test, French retailer E. Leclerc, found that its Local Awareness campaign reached 1.5 million people within 10 kilometers of their stores, and about 12% of clicks on their Facebook ad were followed by a store visit within a week.
And last, the ”Offline Conversions API” tool allows businesses to compare their internal transaction data from their sale systems or customer databases with Facebook’s Ads Reporting tab, helping them track the impact of ads in real-time. Marketers can work directly with Facebook or with partners such as IBM, Invoca, Lightspeed, LiveRamp, Marketo, Square or Index to use the tool, which also helps businesses get better demographic insight into their customers and inform future campaigns. Electronics retailer Fravega said it was able to use the conversion tool to determine that for every dollar of e-commerce revenue it generated from Facebook ads, it was generating an additional $2.20 in revenue from its physical stores.
“It’s critical for small businesses with lean budgets to understand the return on each dollar spent on digital marketing,” said Saumil Mehta, Square’s customer engagement lead. “By syncing their Square sales data with Facebook campaigns, sellers can finally see which sales came from customers who viewed their Facebook ads.”
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