As PPC advertisers using Facebook’s advertising platform, we have a plethora of metrics at our disposal to assess the success of our campaigns.
To name a few, we can track button clicks, scroll depth, time spent on a page, and form completion. On Facebook, there are a total of seventeen standard events that can be tracked as conversions.
Despite tracking so many touchpoints, focusing solely on online conversions does not provide the complete picture. User research journeys are becoming increasingly complicated.
We’ve gotten pretty good at identifying online touchpoints that lead to a sale or lead. Offline activity, on the other hand, can have a significant impact on a sale.
Businesses must be able to track offline activity—especially those with brick-and-mortar locations. In-store sales can have a significant impact on a company’s revenue.
These sales, unlike in the past, may have been influenced by online marketing activities. You can’t see which campaigns affect offline store visits if your online reporting doesn’t track them.
You run the risk of pausing a campaign because you believe it isn’t profitable and then seeing a drop in-store visits as a result.
A conversion pixel cannot track everything. For example, people who advertise online coupon codes to be used in stores when a product is purchased.
Why should you keep tabs on offline conversions?
There are several reasons why you might want to implement an offline conversion tracking method. These will vary depending on what you want to achieve with your Facebook advertising efforts as well as the niche you’re in. There are three general reasons why you would like to track offline conversions:
The first advantage is that it allows you to assess the effectiveness of Facebook advertising campaigns.
To optimize a campaign, statistically significant data is required and the ability to see which areas are achieving your conversion goals.
Once you know which areas are achieving your conversion goals, you can begin to eliminate underperforming areas while increasing traffic from higher-performing areas.
The ability to track offline conversions allows you to optimize your campaigns to increase offline conversions in addition to online conversions.
Consider the following scenario, in which we are running Instagram and Facebook ads. The figures are fictitious to demonstrate a point.
Reason number two: Provide more data to Facebook to optimize your campaigns.
If you use Facebook’s automated bidding option, machine learning algorithms adore data. The more data they have, the better they will be able to perform. By including offline conversions, you provide another touchpoint for Facebook’s algorithms to consider. This implies that they should be able to get better results from your advertising campaigns.
The third Reason, improve reporting.
Offline conversion tracking adds a new dimension to your reporting. In addition to reporting on standard metrics such as clickthrough rate, conversion rate, and online sales, you can also report on the number of store visits.
With store visits included in your Facebook advertising campaign reporting, you can see which campaigns result in in-store visits and which do not.
If your reporting includes week-to-week data, you will be able to see how changes in your marketing efforts affected your offline store as well as your online metrics.
How to Use the Offline Conversions Tool on Facebook
To begin with offline conversions, you must first create an offline event set. This is possible in Events Manager. Offline event sets correspond to offline activity and the online metrics of your Facebook ads.
After you’ve finished creating the data set, you’ll need to upload your offline data to Facebook. You have two options here. To begin, you can integrate it with your CRM system. The second option is to upload a spreadsheet containing your data manually.
It’s like uploading a customer list to Facebook. To keep the information fresh and up to date, it is recommended that you upload your data twice a week.
Here are some best practices for uploading your offline data.
Upload your data regularly – ideally twice a week, but at the very least once every two weeks.
Format properly – this is critical for Facebook to understand and use your data. Your match rate will improve if your data is well-formatted.
Upload as much information as you can – the more information you upload, the more likely Facebook will be able to match your data with its users.
If possible, integrate with your CRM – Marketo, Squarespace, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and Segment are a few CRM integrations. If you’re using a system that doesn’t have a native conversion syncing option, consider Zapier.
Check that all data is correct: The data cannot be removed or updated once uploaded. Check your information twice before uploading to ensure that it is correct and free of errors.
Go to Events Manager, select the appropriate offline event, and then click Upload Events to upload your offline data. You can upload your offline conversion data here.
Following the upload of your data, Facebook will examine a sample to determine what type of data is being used in each column. If there are any errors, you must correct them before your data can be used.
It is also a good idea to have the warnings in your data fixed. After that, click the ‘Review’ button. This will show you how many rows will be uploaded as well as your estimated match rate.
If you are satisfied with this, click the ‘Start upload button to upload your data to Facebook. Most small files can be uploaded entirely in a matter of minutes.
If you have a large file, it may take up to fifteen minutes for your data to appear in the Events Manager and the Facebook reporting interface.
How to Track Offline Conversions
Offline Conversions is one of the columns sets available on Facebook. You can create your personalized columns. As an example, you could have columns such as Offline purchases and Offline purchase conversion value.
After you’ve synced everything and set up all the relevant columns to measure offline success, you can create an audience based on your offline audience.
How to Maximize the Value of Offline Conversions
Here are three-pointers to help you make the most of your offline conversions:
Have at least 50 offline conversions per week – otherwise, Facebook will find it challenging to optimize.
Retargeting: Retarget people who have completed an offline conversion by advertising other products they might be interested in.
Using your synced data, create lookalike audiences – On Facebook, lookalike audiences of online converters can perform exceptionally well.
This is because Facebook creates an audience list like those who purchased your website. Similarly, advertising to people who are like those who have already completed an offline conversion may increase the number of offline conversions.
Finally, in this blog, we’ve covered some fundamentals about what offline conversions are, why Facebook advertisers should use them, and some tips on how to get the most out of them.
If you run Facebook ads for an online retailer, you may not be getting the complete picture if you don’t have offline conversion data. Implement offline conversion data and begin observing the impact of your Facebook advertising on your brick-and-mortar stores.