Facebook recently released several recent studies for brick and mortar businesses proving that Facebook ads do indeed drive in store purchases.
A conversion lift study helped children’s furniture retailer The Land of Nod better understand the role Facebook plays in driving customer acquisition. Advertising during the summer sale, back-to-school and fall launch seasons, a conversion lift study showed that Land of Nod had realized an acquisition lift of 12% through Facebook, proving the efficacy of its recent campaigns and establishing the benchmark for its 2015 Facebook program goals.
This is done using Facebook user IDs, email addresses, and credit card purchasing data. A few of the general stats released were particularly impressive.
- 90% of people who saw a Facebook ad and purchased in store never clicked on an ad at all
- 21% of conversions were not captured when relying on cookie based measurement
So how can a business understand how effective ads were at driving in store purchases? This simple technique is rough but provides a general understanding. First a company creates a Facebook custom audience of all of their customers. This is ideally done through an email address and phone number. When the IDs are uploaded, Facebook compares it with their data to find all the matching IDs. If you import an email address Facebook doesn’t have, it won’t match anything. Facebook will then give you an audience size.
While the campaign is running its extremely important that employees capture an email and phone number at the POS. When the campaign is finished, simply add your new collected sales data to the audience and watch how much it increases.
Obviously, this method has some holes, but it is much better than blindly running ads to zip codes on Facebook!