FACEBOOK CREATES NEW AD SERVICES FOR BRICK-AND-MORTAR STORES

The digital world is a mobile one, and with more than 90% of retail sales taking place in store it’s important to measure the impact mobile advertising has on store visits and sales. While this has proved challenging, Facebook’s new advertising features make it easy for users to find and navigate to the nearest store location, all within the mobile advertising experience, as well as giving businesses the ability to track and measure these visits.

In 2015, Facebook introduced ‘Local Awareness’ advertisements, allowing businesses to create advertisements for every store dynamically, all within a single campaign. The additional features that have now been introduced take this one step further, creating an in-ad map that displays all the store locations that are nearby. Without leaving the app, or the ad, users can see the location, address, opening hours, contact information, and travel time for each store.

Further, new metrics in reporting enable stores to measure traffic as a result of their Local Awareness campaigns. Advertisers can see how many people visit a store after seeing a Facebook campaign and measure how many sales these visits convert to. Additionally, advertisers are able to compare results across stores and regions. Businesses can understand the return of each dollar spent on their digital marketing, optimising their creative, budget, and audience.

Store visits are measured from people with location services enabled on their phones, and will be made available globally in the coming months. Store sales can be connected to Facebook advertising through the offline conversations API, matching transaction data to adverts reporting. An interesting benefit of this is the ability to understand advertising effectiveness in real time.

With Facebook reporting that 45% of people use mobile in shopping journeys, these new features offer greater functionality in the availability of information, helping to create a more connected shopping experience for both users and advertisers.