Three weeks ago B&T ran a case study that showed fashion retailer Country Road got a whopping $18.20 return on every $1 it invested in social media marketing. Here, Kat Karvess (pictured below), digital manager for social media agency Ellis Jones, takes a look at how it crunched the final numbers…
Australian fashion brand Country Road recently published a case study with Facebook that claimed, “For every $1 we spend on social, we make $18.20 back in revenue.” B&T wrote about it and we picked it up at Ellis Jones, an integrated communications consultancy. Other marketers across the country were no doubt as impressed by these figures as we were. It became a hot topic of office debate as we wondered: how were these conversions measured?
Facebook advertising is a valuable tool for business and marketers wanting to reach audiences in a targeted way. It can be highly effective in driving traffic to websites, increasing audience reach and driving engagement to Facebook business pages.
It is easy to track and measure online advertising effectiveness, but decidedly less easy to quantify how many offline leads are generated as a result of Facebook advertising.
We know we can measure conversion rates to a website from Facebook using a conversion pixel, but how do we measure offline sales attributable to Facebook advertising?
Earlier in June, Facebook introduced new advertising features developed specifically for retailers with brick-and-mortar stores. These were designed to help businesses quantify walk-ins and referrals via Facebook.
Still in development, it’s called the ‘Store locator’ and is an application that helps Facebook users quickly find the physical location of a retailer’s shop by providing access to a map as well as further information including address, trading hours, phone number, website and estimated time to travel to those stores from the user’s current location.
Store visits give retailers information on the number of people who viewed ads on Facebook then actually visited those shops using an offline conversions API (Application Programming Interface). Non-techies, stick with me.
This API provides insights to business owners about the impact of their Facebook ad campaigns on in-store transactions, and more.
Here’s what Facebook has to say about the new ad features: “Historically, it has been difficult to quickly and effectively measure the impact of advertising on store visits and in-store sales. With the launch of store visits — a new metric in ads reporting — advertisers can now better understand their store traffic after running local awareness ads, complementing current ads reporting to provide a more complete picture.
“Advertisers can use store visits reporting to:
- See how many people come to your store after seeing a Facebook campaign.
- Optimise ad creative, delivery and targeting based on store visits.
- Analyse results across stores and regions to plan and optimise future campaigns.
“The store locator shows a map of all the locations a business has nearby. People can click on the map in the ad to see information about nearby locations. Without leaving the ad or app, they can view the address, hours, phone number, website and estimated travel time for each store.
“The store locator can be added to any local awareness ad and is available now to all advertisers.”
What does this all mean?
Put simply, businesses on Facebook now have a way to connect transactions that take place offline (i.e. in person or over the phone) to their adverts online.
The offline conversions API lets businesses match transaction data from their databases or POS (Point of Sale) systems to their ads reporting. This helps them better understand the efficacy of their Facebook ads in real-time, helping optimise future ads, and quantifying offline conversions.
This new feature is an invaluable tool for bricks-and-mortar businesses that will surely improve further as the digital marketplace evolves.
We’ve started playing around with this tool for our clients at Ellis Jones, and we’re sure it’s going to be a game changer in how marketers look at return on investment.
[Source:- B & T]
