Mobile is blurring the line between the physical and digital worlds, from how people discover things to how they find places to shop. People increasingly navigate through the world on mobile. While people use mobile in 45% of all shopping journeys,¹ the majority of sales still happen in brick-and-mortar businesses. In fact, more than 90% of retail sales take place in-store.²

A fundamental challenge for brick-and-mortar businesses today is measuring the impact of their advertising campaigns on store visits and sales. Today we’re announcing new solutions for businesses to drive people to their stores and measure the amount of store visits and in-store sales following their Facebook mobile ad campaigns.

Local awareness ads aim to bring people to your business, whether you have a single store or thousands of locations. The ads show people the stores nearest to them and offer relevant call-to-actions like “Get Directions,” making it easy for people to shop the store most convenient to them. Last year we introduced features that enabled businesses with multiple locations to create ads for every store dynamically within a single campaign. Now we’re launching a native store locator to help people find and navigate to the nearest store location, all within the ad format.

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.

“One of our key marketing objectives is to make Tesco advertising ‘helpful’ for our customers. Local awareness ads allow us to show people relevant products and offers at the Tesco stores convenient to them, which is key to delivering on the promise of ‘helpfulness.’ The new store locator functionality builds on this capability and stands out as a great example of how advertising formats can adapt to how people are using their mobile devices.” - Alicia Howard, Head of Social Media and Digital Content, Tesco

The store locator can be added to any local awareness ad and is available now to all advertisers.

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:

“Creating a connected shopping experience for our customers is really important to M&S. We’re looking forward to getting a deeper insight into how our customers’ interaction on Facebook is inspiring them to engage with our brand offline.” - Marcus East, Digital Director, Marks & Spencer

“It is important we engage with customers on their own terms and in a natural manner. Facebook’s store visits solution gives us the unique opportunity to increase, understand and capture dealership foot traffic in a way that could be directly linked to our media strategy.” – Eric Jillard, Director of Digital and Retail Marketing, Cadillac

Advertisers including E.Leclerc, M&S, Petco, Burger King UK and Cadillac have used store visits to better understand foot traffic to their locations after running local awareness ads. French retailer E.Leclerc was able to reach 1.5 million people within 10 kilometers of their stores and found that approximately 12% of clicks on their ad were followed by a visit to store within 7 days.

Store visits is an estimated metric based on information from people with location services enabled on their phone. The metric will be rolling out to advertisers globally over the coming months.

Advertisers now have a way to connect transactions that take place in store or over the phone to their ads. The Offline Conversions API allows businesses to match transaction data from their customer database or point-of-sale system to Ads Reporting, helping them better understand the effectiveness of their ads in real-time. Businesses can work with partners such as IBM, Index, Invoca, Lightspeed, LiveRamp, Marketo and Square or with Facebook directly.

Advertisers can use the Offline Conversions API to:

“At Fravega we were able to show that for every dollar of e-commerce revenue we were generating from Facebook ads, we were actually getting an additional $2.20 in our brick-and-mortar stores. With the Offline Conversions API we were able to optimize our investment and increase spending with confidence.” - Mariano Tordo, Digital Marketing Manager, Fravega

“It’s critical for small businesses with lean budgets to understand the return on each dollar spent on digital marketing. By syncing their Square sales data with Facebook campaigns, sellers can finally see which sales came from customers who viewed their Facebook ads.” - Saumil Mehta, Customer Engagement Lead, Square

“Marketo is excited to work with Facebook to help marketers boost their advertising return on investment (ROI). By combining offline customer behaviors captured in the Marketo Audience Hub with Facebook ads, marketers can not only drive stronger ad personalization, but can also connect these offline activities back to their Facebook ads. Simply put, this combined solution enables marketers to optimize and measure the complete business value of their advertising spend.” - Sanjay Dholakia, CMO, Marketo

We’re currently testing the Offline Conversions API across all ad objectives, including local awareness.

With these new features, businesses now have a way to encourage and measure foot traffic and in-store sales, giving them more power and information to improve campaign performance. Here’s an example of how these features give businesses more and better information.

A national retail chain, Jasper’s Boutique, runs an ad on Facebook and people see it.

Some of those people visit a Jasper’s location in person and may have used the store locator feature to get directions to the business.

While there, some make purchases.

The store traffic and sales are tallied in Ads Manager, giving Jasper’s a complete picture of the activity connected to their ads across the country.

Get started with these new features by creating a local awareness ad today, or learn more.