In-Store, Meet Mobile: New Ways to Increase and Measure Store Visits and Sales
Mobile is blurring the line between the physical and digital worlds, from how people discover things to how they find places to shop. People increasingly navigate through the world on mobile. While people use mobile in 45% of all shopping journeys,the majority of sales still occur in brick-and-mortar businesses. In fact, more than 90% of retail sales take place in store.
A fundamental challenge for brick-and-mortar businesses today is measuring the impact of their advertising campaigns on shop visits and sales. Today, we’re announcing new solutions for businesses to drive people to their shops and measure the amount of shop visits and in-store sales following their Facebook mobile advertising campaigns.
Help people find your business
Local Awareness adverts aim to bring people to your business, whether you have a single shop or thousands of locations. The adverts show people the shops nearest to them and offer relevant Calls to Action, such as “Get Directions”, making it easy for people to shop at the location which is most convenient for them. Last year, we introduced features that enabled businesses with multiple locations to create adverts for every shop dynamically
within a single campaign. Now we’re launching a native shop locator to help people find and navigate to the nearest shop location, all within the advert format.
Shop locators on businesses’ websites can be frustrating for people on mobile, requiring several taps or typing a postal code into a small form. The new shop locator removes this friction to help people on mobile find business locations quickly and easily.
The shop locator shows a map of all of the locations that a business has nearby. People can click on the map in the advert to view information about nearby locations. Without leaving the advert or app, they can view the address, opening times, phone number, website and estimated travel time for each shop.
“One of our key marketing objectives is to make Tesco advertising ‘helpful’ for our customers. Local Awareness adverts allow us to show people relevant products and offers at the Tesco shops that are convenient for them, which is key to delivering on the promise of ‘helpfulness’. The new shop 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.” – Alicia Howard, Head of Social Media and Digital Content, Tesco
The shop locator can be added to any Local Awareness advert and is available now to all advertisers.
Measure shop visits from Facebook adverts
Historically, it has been difficult to quickly and effectively measure the impact of advertising on shop visits and in-store sales. With the launch of shop visits, a new metric in adverts reporting, advertisers can now better understand their shop traffic after running Local Awareness adverts, complementing current adverts reporting to provide a more complete picture.
Advertisers can use shop visits reporting 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.
We’re looking forward to getting a deeper insight into how our customers’ interactions on Facebook are inspiring them to engage with our brand offline.” – Marcus East, Digital Director, Marks & Spencer “It is important that we engage with customers on their own terms and in a natural manner.
Facebook’s shop visits solution gives us the unique opportunity to increase, understand and capture dealership foot traffic in a way that could be directly linked to our media strategy.” – Eric Jillard, Director of Digital and Retail Marketing, Cadillac
Advertisers including E.Leclerc, M&S, Petco, Burger King UK and Cadillac have used shop visits to better understand foot traffic to their locations after running Local Awareness adverts. French retailer E.Leclerc was able to reach 1.5 million people within 10 kilometres of their shops and found that approximately 12% of clicks on their advert were followed by a visit to a shop within seven days.
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.
Connect shop sales to Facebook advertising campaigns
Advertisers now have a way to connect transactions that take place in store or over the phone to their adverts. The offline conversions API allows businesses to match transaction data from their customer database or point-of-sale system to adverts reporting, helping them better understand the effectiveness of their adverts in real time.
Businesses can work with partners such as IBM, Index, Invoca, Lightspeed, LiveRamp, Marketo and Square, or with Facebook directly.
Advertisers can use the offline conversions API to:
See real-time results as transactions occur in store and over the phone.
Gain demographic insights about people who purchase.
Optimise future campaigns.
“At Fravega, we were able to show that for every dollar of e-commerce revenue that we were generating from Facebook adverts, we were actually getting an additional ARS 2.20 in our brick-and-mortar shops. With the offline conversions API, we were able to optimise our investment and increase spending with confidence.” – Mariano Tordo, Digital Marketing Manager, Fravega
“It’s critical for small businesses with lean budgets to understand the return on each dollar spent on digital marketing.
By syncing their Square sales data with Facebook campaigns, sellers can finally see which sales came from customers who viewed their Facebook adverts.” – Saumil Mehta, Customer Engagement Lead, Square
“Marketo is excited to work with Facebook to help marketers boost their advertising return on investment (ROI). By combining offline customer behaviours captured in the Marketo Audience Hub with Facebook adverts, marketers can not only drive stronger advert personalisation, but also connect these offline activities back to their Facebook adverts. Simply put, this combined solution enables marketers to optimise and measure the complete business value of their advertising spend.” – Sanjay Dholakia, CMO, Marketo. We’re currently testing the offline conversions API across all advertising objectives, including Local Awareness.
Grow traffic and sales in your shops
With these new features, businesses now have a way to encourage and measure foot traffic and in-store sales, giving them more power and information to improve campaign performance.