How To Track In-Store Visits from Facebook Ad Campaigns

Carly Webber

• Social Media

We run a lot of Facebook Local Awareness Advertising Campaigns for our clients. We also have a lot of conversations with these clients about the best way to track the ROI of these campaigns. Up until today, the best way to do this was tracking how many users clicked on the ads, the number of impressions on the ads and how many offers were claimed and shown in stores.

There’s always been a bit of a disconnect of being able to attribute Facebook ad spend to the actual foot traffic in-store. UNTIL YESTERDAY.

Facebook announced that they are rolling out a way to measure in-store visits and in-store sales that result from Facebook Ad Campaigns. Here’s what’s new:

Native Store Locator

The new Native Store Locator function allows users to find and navigate to the nearest store location – all while staying on Facebook. Users can see the address, store hours, contact number, website and estimated travel time from their location ALL WITHIN THE AD! (Talk about an ad that works for you!)

Measuring In-Store Visits

Honestly this is as equally awesome as it is creepy. This new metric that is being provided by Facebook allows you to correlate the effectiveness of your local awareness ad campaigns to your in-store visits. If a user has location services turned on on their phone – and maintain a logged-in status on their Facebook App, you’ll be able to see the results that show when a Facebook user saw your ad and then came into your brick-and-mortar store.

This feature and metric was beta tested with a few Facebook partners, and they’re boasting about some of the positive results they’ve seen so far:

“French retailer E.Leclerc was able to reach 1.5 million people within 10 kilometers of their stores and found that approximately 12% of clicks on their ad were followed by a visit to their store within 7 days.”

Connecting In-Store Sales to Facebook Ad Campaigns

This feature is a little more advanced. Users now have the ability to use an ‘Offline Conversions API’ to match transactions made over the phone or in-store with currently running Facebook Ad Campaigns. In order to get this setup and track these transactions, businesses must partner with IBM, Index, Invoca, Lightspeed, LiveRamp, Marketo, Square or directly with Facebook.

“It’s critical for small businesses with lean budgest 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 Ads.” – Saumil Mehta, Customer Engagement Lead at Square

Honestly we’re just stoked that we get to eliminate some of the guessing that comes with attributing ad spend to local awareness campaigns.

For your business – if you are a brick and mortar store – you should no longer have to be convinced to run these local awareness ad campaigns. Not only can you see the standard analytics – like clicks, impressions, reach, etc – but now you can actually see who acts on this and comes into your store. Time to put your creeper advertising hats on.

Want to learn more about how we can help you out with Social Media Advertising for your business? We want that too. Contact us today and let’s get some people in your store.