How To Track Offline Sales From Facebook Ads

Facebook is maturing as an advertising platform. For those who use Facebook for personal connection, that’s probably not great news. But for brands and marketers, it’s the beginning of a new age in social marketing: the ability to connect offline sales to online advertising.

Here’s how it works.

We start by creating a custom audience within Facebook. This audience is made up of email addresses and mobile phone numbers collected from customer lists, email newsletters, online signup forms, loyalty programs, surveys or even that paper pad of signups next to the register. The data is uploaded to Facebook in a hashed, privacy-protected way, with the goal of matching your list to Facebook users.  (Typically we’ll see a 60% match).

We then create and launch a targeted ad campaign to this custom audience. When a subsequent purchase at your physical store is made and the customer swipes a credit card or loyalty card as part of the transaction, contact details and email addresses are tagged to the sales data.

When the campaign is complete, we will tap into the sales data and upload an encrypted version to Facebook, using partnership data from Datalogix, BlueKai, Epsilon, and Acxiom to determine how people who saw the ad bought versus a control group of people in the custom audience to whom we did not show the ads.

The end result isn’t perfect, but it’s a huge leap forward in measuring offline influence from online ad campaigns. This measurement can extend beyond the single conversion note, to looking at overall return on investment.

The impact:

A better understanding of the role mobile plays in offline purchases.  The ability to measure ROI of impressions, not just clicks, has massive impact. First, 70% of Facebook users are mobile-only and second, because of the disruptive nature of mobile ads to user-task, mobile ads don’t have great CTR’s. This offers a whole new way to measure ROI.

The ability to measure offline impact provides us with a more holistic view of ROI. For example, we might learn that people who see your Facebook ad spent 68% more than those who did not. There is huge value in the increased order size that would be entirely missed if the campaign were only measured on clicks and conversions. Would you run an ad that increased AOS by 68%? Absolutely!