Wouldn’t it be great to run an ad on social and be able to see the effectiveness of how much traffic it drive? Sounds like a dream or a something a ways off. It’s not any longer. Facebook announced this week the new Store locater for location awareness ads. It’s a long name for a really cool new ad format.
What are local Awareness ads?
Local awareness ads aim to bring people to your business, whether you have a single store or thousands of locations. The ads show people the stores nearest to them and offer relevant call-to-actions like “Get Directions,” making it easy for people to shop the store most convenient to them. Last year we introduced features that enabled businesses with multiple locations to create ads for every store dynamically within a single campaign. Now we’re launching a native store locator to help people find and navigate to the nearest store location, all within the ad format.
If you watch the video at the top of the ad you can see how this works. It allows you to feature all locations of your business. People can move around the map and see which location is the closest. Without leaving the ad unit you can see the address, hours, phone number, website and estimated travel time for each store.
How can you measure people who actually come the store? They are adding new analytics. These are the ways Facebook are helping businesses see how effective their ads are at driving traffic.
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See how many people come to your store after seeing a Facebook campaign
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Optimize ad creative, delivery and targeting based on store visits
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Analyze results across stores and regions to plan and optimize future campaigns
If you connect this with the Offline Conversions API, Facebook says you can do the following:
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See real-time results as transactions occur in-store and over the phone
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Gain demographic insights about people who purchase
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Optimize future campaigns
How will this affect your business?
It will allow you to see how effective your social campaigns are for business. Both Google and Facebook are branching into ways to see real world actions on ads. If you have local business locations, this will give you a better judge of your paid social. This along with local insights they released a few weeks ago. They can tell you how many people are in the area of your business.
My only concern is for smaller businesses it maybe a bit harder to set up on your own. It may take some work. I haven’t had a chance to see it in action or how to make the ads. I hope they make it as easy as possible. If you want to learn more on this go to the Facebook for Business page.
