Over the past decade, social media has been considered as a major tool while planning strategies for topline brands of any industry. Specifically Facebook has turned out to be a giant marketing tool that has made a great difference. Based on demographics and many other factors, it offers a lot of valuable data to businesses so that they may reach out their target audience. From generating leads to increasing brand awareness, getting real-time results, increasing website traffic, and what not; it has been a crucial element of every business’s marketing strategy. Since the results have been amazingly wonderful, it made the Facebook team focus on strengthening their system that may allow the entrepreneurs emerge and work on their strategies in a more holistic manner.
Brands have been looking for something to integrate their social media efforts with offline (brick and mortar) store’s traffic for quite a long. It would have been a risky feat that Facebook confronted courageously, and come up with the update of “Offline Events Manager.”
What is Offline Event Manager?
If you own a Business Manager account, you are able to create offline event sets. With the help of that Facebook’s Business Manager Account, you’ll be led to upload offline events so that the transactions occurring in physical stores as a result of Facebook ads may be tracked down easily.
What do you Understand by an Facebook Offline Conversion?
An offline conversion refers to those customer purchases that are made in a physical store. Generating an ecommerce sales through social media channels is not a big deal because the Facebook insights can be associated with the analytics of ecommerce store through cookies, pixels, and tags, etc. making data tracking breezy. Bridging the gap between social media content and offline conversions is a serious challenge since there are no tags, cookies, and even pixels to pass out the collected data of users. Contrarily, there is a way to customer tracking solution by running an exclusive in-store offer that will be promoted on social media platforms, which still has a drawback that it costs you an arm and a leg. Comparatively, you get a bang for your buck while running a marketing campaign on Facebook.
Amenably, Facebook has a large stash of database through which it may assist you to a great extent. The process gets a lot more accurate when you opt to work with offline conversions. What you have to do is provide Facebook with your sales records including time, date, value, and customer identification that will be look for a match through its database. Ensure to check if they have been exposed to the ads designed through you Facebook page. If yes, then the tracking gets a little narrower by attributing it to the value of last post from your page whether the user has got engaged with or not. The most important question that pops up here is if the user has clicked on your Facebook ad before making the purchase.
Things to be considered while Planning Facebook Offline Conversions
Before the attribution of your offline event data with the customer system, you must plan on the following few things so that the ideal results are generated.
1. Know the way you are going to plan and upload your sales data. While doing so, make sure that you are using a CRM which is already set up for the integration with offline conversions. Either way, you can also you can integrate the Offline conversion API with your PoS by building a custom solution.
2. You cannot go manual when uploading the data on an offline event set. When you upload any data, Facebook only takes the transactions that had only took place in last 90 days. plus, conversion are attributed when the data is collected to see if a user has clicked the ad – that lasts till the serving of an ad for 28 days. You have to be plan strategy and make a report at the end of every month regarding the number of conversions that are made so it may be used for comparative analysis next month. If you want to collect the real-time attribution data, the best way is to connect with the API of offline conversion for the PoS system to get updated with transaction data automatically. And if you want it to be uploaded manually, you need to do it within the 48 hours of a transaction took place. For many brands and agencies, it turns out to be quite challenging as how the data is available readily. It is advisable to be very cautious and avoid errors while uploading data manually because the data once uploaded cannot be edited or deleted.
3. It is an undeniable fact that learning as a scope. You must monitor the data and experience the results that are earned through the attributions made. Keep on checking on checking them more often whether it is good or bad, and after then prepare the official report. Irregular behavior of the ads is natural since they might not match to the ideal expected result, there is no need to worry. A vast analysis of previous ads’ performances make you plan the spending, engagement, and impressions for a potential ad in future accordingly. You would know the kind of audience that drives offline sales more frequently. Also, you may know the strategies that work well for driving offline sales as well as which generate offline conversions. Many other queries like what sort of messages covert leads, if your marketing tactics worked, etc. are also answered.
Conclusion
Social media channels are upgrading to draw a line between ad dollar and conversion. And Facebook is the pioneer of this massive change. However, improvements are keep on coming for tracking the capabilities of offline conversion and making brands aware about the line of attribution. And when you are operating in systems, you can’t ignore different bugs and flaws but don’t let them stop you. Keep an eye over every solution that works best for you.
