Facebook marketing has stumped many a marketeer – we all know that it’s effective but just how effective and what’s the Return on Investment? Tracking sales, even online sales, has proven tricky and the most many retailers have managed is measure ‘assists’ rather than sales.
The importance of capturing email addresses for in-store customers
Measuring social success is even more tricky when using Facebook to drive in-store traffic, when a consumer makes a purchase and leaves nothing more than a credit card number how do you know where the sale came from? Retailers need to start capturing more information and the email address is the holy grail which ties online and offline together. If you’re not capturing your in-store customers’ email addresses then you’re missing a trick and it’s time to start doing so.
Facebook ads drive in-store sales
Black Friday 2017 is fast approaching and it’s the best time of year to scoop up some great bargains on everything from toys to tech.
Although bricks-and-mortar bargain hunters are poised to storm the high street again this year, Facebook’s recent results have reported a massive increase in advertising revenue, growing faster than even their own projections: Mobile ad revenue of $8.9 billion made up 88% of Facebook’s total revenue, up from 84% a year ago. Indeed, the company’s third-quarter ad revenue rose 49% to $10.1 billion, beating the consensus of $9.71 billion.
So what is it about this social media platform that has attracted a sudden rise in retail interest as their shop-window of choice?
Facebook reach and relevancy
In part, Facebook’s success can be attributed to reach and relevancy. Facebook has more users and more user data than any advertising platform on the planet, allowing advertisers to reach broad audiences with personalised-to-user ads. But all giants have growing pains, and when you’re building technology for five million advertisers, there will be some challenges left unsolved.
To solve those challenges, StitcherAds have been developing intuitive marketing tools to help advertisers get the most revenue impact from their ad spend. With tech focused on scalability and performance for direct response marketing, StitcherAds has empowered some of Facebook’s largest advertisers, engineering solutions to meet specific goals and unlock lucrative capabilities. Most recently, StitcherAds launched a unified commerce solution that integrates retailers’ point of sale data with Facebook’s offline API and new ad formats for driving in-store purchase.
Through StitcherAds’ new feature, which deconstructs the complex relationship between social media ads and bricks-and-mortar buying behaviour, retail marketers now have access to accurate, identity-based data on how Facebook and Instagram ads impact in-store revenue, allowing them to target offline purchases online.
“Driving in-store traffic is no longer a television and print advertiser’s game. Consumers live on their mobile devices, and we now have the technology to validate that the ads you see on your newsfeed are actually leading you into stores. This data opens up endless opportunities for retailers to build campaigns that convert across multiple channels. We’re excited to be at the forefront of the unified commerce frontier and defining what it means for the future of retail marketing.”
– Declan Kennedy, StitcherAds CEO
Based on retailers’ early use of this new unified commerce feature, StitcherAds has been able to effectively match in-store customer details with Facebook users at accuracy rates of up to 93%. For some retailers, StitcherAds’ new capability has attributed as much as 27% of all in-store customers to engagement with Facebook ads in the previous 28 days. These retailers achieved these results with as little as 5 percent of their total ad budget dedicated to an in-store objective, proving the upward potential of offline ad formats.
This year, balance the Black Friday foot traffic with online deals by leveraging Facebook’s new offline tools to draw current and new customers in store ahead of time this Christmas.
2 Responses
I’ve never had any success using Facebook advertising (I think I’ve tried everything). I get lots of “likes”, but the profiles don’t look real – either blank or appear to have little on them but “liked” products. I have never had a sale which I know to have been sent by Facebook. Anyone considering advertising using Facebook I advise to investigate/research first, it seems to be a common experience. I feel I have wasted quite a bit of money on what appears to be fake clicks.
We tend to get our best results from Facebook marketing. We tend to use video however, and we also do OK with Insta . However people should not be fooled it is not easy and we were a good year or so till we started getting real results and a lot of cost along the way. Plus if you are not currently say running a Facebook ad they tend to make sure you get nothing with organic reach, they are only after your “buck” at the end of the day.
The UK is hard work to be fair due to the saturation effect and cheapest price wins. However for ROI we do OK with the EU and ROW markets. It is the most effective tool we currently have at our disposal. Google adwords waste of time for us, same with Twitter.