PlaceConf: Facebook, On Location

At today’s Place Conference in New York City, Gabriel Francis, the Team Lead and Product Marketing Manager of Offline Sales, discussed how the company is helping advertisers show more relevant ads to consumers and remove the complexity businesses face in trying to engage with them throughout the path to conversion.

Last year Facebook announced two solutions to help marketers better understand their ads impact on offline results- Store Visits and Offline Conversions. In his talk, Gabriel gave an update on Facebook’s progress on these solutions and shared examples of how marketers can use them to advance their businesses.

When developing and evolving these offerings, Facebook asks themselves the following:

  • How do we help show more relevant advertising for clients?
  • How do we prove that those ads are working?
  • How do we provide the tools and insights to help advertisers close the loop and optimize?

Francis mentioned that 56% of store purchases are influenced by digital interactions. Marketers are struggling to engage consumers digitally, capture them at relevant points in time, and then understand if conversions are happening in-store or online as a result of those engagements. Facebook believes the key to success is considering where people are spending their time on their mobile devices.

Facebook has identified that:

  • 75% of Instagrammers take action after being inspired by a post seen on the platform
  • 60% of Instagrammers learn about new products on Instagram
  • 30% of US retail shoppers have discovered a new product on Facebook
  • While in store, 1 in 10 people open the Facebook app on their phone
  • Consumers spend 5 minutes on average on Facebook while in the store

The company’s various platforms can be used to close the loop for retailers when it comes to engaging with and influencing consumers. In the past six months, the company has worked on developing tools to optimize against store visits, to optimize by reach, and to lower total cost per store visit. The Store Visit Objectives specifically allow retailers to optimize for consumers most likely to visit a specific store, reach people in a specific radius around those stores and then automatically populate a consumer’s device with an ad related to the closest store.

From carousel ads that use location data to provide maps to the nearest store locations, to canvas and collection ads that allow advertisers to replicate their print catalogs within web ads, these new Facebook ad formats are creating deeper levels of engagement for users. Local-based ads like these allow marketers to create extremely relevant ads for consumers at a time when personalization is more important to them than ever before.

Leave a Reply

(Comment Guidelines)



First Name

Last Name

Company Name

Email Address