The driving factor of the digital marketing revolution comes down to one simple attribute, measurability. Digital marketing allows you to gain insight into your consumer audience that traditional was never able to obtain.
The granularity of digital marketing has become so precise that advertisers are able to identify the exact dollar amount an ad has driven for their company. This is what makes digital marketing so appealing; the ability to see direct results from the money that you have invested. The main issue, is that this level of detailed reporting lives within the consumer’s journey in the digital world. All actions taken offline are lost.
Related: Delivery Insights: Get More Out of Your Facebook Ad Campaigns
This is a major issue for the digital advertiser because according to eMarketer, “ Over 90% of sales still take place in-store”. What is not accounted for is how people are discovering these new brands and products. In fact, Deloitte Digital states that “56% of in-store sales were influenced by digital interactions, and 66% of those interactions were on mobile”. Luckily for us, Facebook has created a way to bridge the gap between the online and offline world.
Offline Conversions: The Solution
Facebook has found a way to marry your in-store data with your digital advertising efforts. How it works is it allows users to connect their Point of Sale or CRM data into their Facebook account. It then is able to identify users who were served your ads and who ended up converting in stores. This is extremely useful for a number of industries whose primary purchase point is still in the actual brick-and-mortar.
How To Implement Offline Conversions:
To get things started, you have to go to Offline Events within your Business Manager:
You will be directed to a page that looks like the image below, click the green button to continue.
Then read through the terms and conditions and then accept the terms if you choose to proceed.
Now you are going to name your Offline Event Set and add a Description:
Now you will select the ad account(s) that you wish this offline event to apply to. You will choose multiple ad accounts if those ad accounts are promoting the same business. You can also, choose to automatically turn on that Offline Event Set for all of your business accounts. Turn on auto-tracking and Facebook will automatically track Offline Events for that paired ad account and Offline Event set for existing and future campaigns.
Click ‘Next’ and your Offline Event Set will have been created.
Now that the Offline Event Set is set up, you have to input your offline data for Facebook to compare with your online data. It is very similar to uploading CRM data to create Custom Audiences.
So first things first, Click “Upload Offline Events”
At this step you will input your CSV or TXT file of offline data. You can input Data consisting of Event Descriptors which are “Event Time, Event Name, Value, Currency, Order ID, Item Number” and you can input data which are consumer identifiers, which is exactly the same fields as importing a Custom Audience. If you need help preparing your data you can reference this link: Best Practices For Preparing Your Customer Data. Once you’ve uploaded the file click next.
Now Facebook maps the data provided with the internal data. If there is data that does not match up with one of the identifiers, you can either click Do Not Upload or try and reformat the data to be identifiable. You can reference Best Practices For Preparing Your Customer Data to ensure that your data is formatted correctly. Once Finished, Click Upload.
If there are no errors you will be taken to this page.
After you click Done, you’ll see that you Offline Event Set is in your list. Also note, that you can upload more Offline Data to this set in the future. This will ensure that your offline events are always up to date.
Now that you have your Offline Event Set, you have to assign it to an ad. If you go into Power Editor, you will notice “Offline Tracking” under Pixel Tracking at the Ad Level. By Default, Facebook will not track Offline Events, so you will have to turn it on and then select the Event Set you want it to track.
Now that your Offline Tracking is set-up, you are able to pull reporting on it. To do so, first you are going to need to customize your columns.
Related:Are You Selling Yourself Short on Your Facebook Reporting?
You will now have an Offline section on the left hand column.
You can now select which events to report on based upon the spreadsheet you inputted on your Offline Event Set and bring your marketing efforts full circle.
This tool allows you to bridge the gap between your online and offline efforts and dig further into how Facebook is affecting your business as a whole.
