Facebook is launching a new way for brick-and-mortar business owners to measure if their Facebook ads drove in-store sales, even if customers never clicked. Businesses can buy ads, then send Facebook privacy-safe data on who bought what, and Facebook will tell them how much people who saw the ads bought compared to those who didn’t.
By providing confidence in return on investment from ad impressions, Facebook could get advertisers spending more, especially on mobile where ad clicks disrupt the user experience. Plus, the info could help marketers learn what ads actually resonate with people, which in turn helps users and Facebook by making ads in the feed more relevant and less annoying.
Ad measurement might not sound super sexy, but the marketing industry is experiencing a massive leap forward in how it tracks ROI right now.
Once upon a time, marketers had little idea if their ads worked. They’d buy TV or print campaigns in specific markets, and then hope to see sales lift there too. The problem was there were tons of confounding factors, and it was tough to tell if a buyer had actually seen the ad. Online advertising changed everything. Suddenly marketers could track that a user clicked an ad that sent them to their site where they made a purchase, indicating the ad worked.
Unfortunately, there were a ton of limitations. If the ad wasn’t the last click before the purchase, they were hard to tie together. That led marketers to put a premium on “demand fulfillment” campaigns like search keyword ads that could be easily tracked, but this shortchanged any “demand generation” ads the user saw before that might have contributed to their purchase decision. If users only saw an ad but didn’t click, then bought something later, the advertiser may not have known that impression had an impact.
Google, Facebook, and others eventually began developing ways to tell if someone who simply saw an ad later made a purchase online. But that still left the connection between online ads and offline sales in brick-and-mortar stores as a big mystery.
Until now. Facebook’s new Custom Audiences measurement could make it clear that someone didn’t just stumble into a physical store’s big Sunday sale, but instead saw an ad for it that inspired their visit.
Facebook’s Vice President Of Ads Product Marketing Brian Boland tells me “This has never been done at this scale, to link digital exposure to in-store sales for anyone with a CRM system.” Previously, Facebook had been privately testing the measurement tool with a select few advertisers, but now it’s available to any advertiser that buys directly from Facebook’s managed sales team.
View the Original article
0 comments:
Post a Comment