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Facebook is launching new mobile advertising solutions aimed at helping to get customers into stores when they’re out and about.
The new solutions will also be able to assess the impact of business’ Facebook mobile advertising campaigns through the measurement of shop visits and instore sales.
The company has launched a native shop locator within its Local Awareness adverts which show people the shops nearest to them and offer relevant calls to action such as ‘get directions.’
Shop locator
The new shop locator will mean that consumers can see a map of all the locations a business has nearby and click on the map in the advert for information about nearby locations such as address, opening times, website and estimated travel time.
The new function can be added to any Local Awareness advert and is available now to advertisers.
Shop visits
Facebook has also launched shop visits, a new reporting metric that will measure how many people came to an advertiser’s shop after seeing a Facebook campaign, optimise advert creative, delivery and targeting based on shop visits and analyse results across shops and regions in order to plan and optimise future campaigns.
Advertisers such as M&S and Burger King UK have already used the function and it will be rolled out globally to advertisers over the coming months.
Offline conversation API
In addition, Facebook’s launching an offline conversion API, which will allow businesses to match transaction data from their customer database or point of sale system to adverts reporting, enabling them to better understand how well their adverts are working.
Businesses can use the API directly with Facebook or through partners such as IBM and Lightspeed. The function will also advertisers to see real time results as transactions occur instore and over the phone, gain demographic insights into customers and optimise future campaigns as a result.
