Wi-Fi & Facebook Offline Events
Do you use Facebook or Instagram ads to promote your physical store or business?
Want to know if your ads are working? It’s easy on a website. But now you can also report if you are driving foot traffic.
Facebook now let you track in-store or live event visits that occur after people see or engage with your Facebook ads.
The tricky part is how you report back to Facebook who has been in your business. At PoweredLocal, we’ve solved that.
In this article, you’ll discover how to track conversions on Facebook ads for offline events without having to manually push any data.
What Are Facebook Offline Events?
Facebook rolled out Offline Events in August 2017 so you can evaluate how your Facebook ads drive offline conversions such as foot traffic, event attendance, or sales in your brick-and-mortar location.
Previously, you couldn’t track these results accurately (or at all). The only reliable metrics were for online events that could be tracked with Facebook’s conversion pixel. The ability to track offline events is a huge development both for local businesses and those that primarily sell in-store.
Facebook’s Offline Events works by syncing hard data (as CRM or POS systems) of what’s happening offline with your Facebook ads. Specifically, you would generally need to upload a file that has information like the customer’s name, email address, phone number and time & date of interaction. Facebook then compares that data with the users who saw specific ad campaigns, and gives you more accurate conversion analysis. This also means that your ads can automatically optimise to provide more effective (lower CPA) advertising.
One of the key features of the solution is its deterministic design which enables marketers to explicitly see the offline outcomes of their effort with very high accuracy (greater than 80%). Other solutions, that attribute offline conversions to online world, use a probabilistic approach, where the outcomes are estimated with at best a 50% precision. So in a nutshell, if you want to measure conversions for an offline business, you are in the right place.
How does Wi-Fi help?
Wi-Fi does nothing for Facebook offline events… But the data that PoweredLocal collects from users that come and use Wi-Fi in your venue is Gold Dust. We’re marketers and not IT people, so we get this. We’ve built the integrations and tools to automatically report back to Facebook who has come into your venue and when.
It goes a little something like this… (this is a simplified version of the complex back-end of facebook).
You put up a sweet ad for your Barber Shop.
Gary is scrolling Facebook over lunch and scrolls past you ad. Facebook knows Gary has noticed this ad. Whether he clicked on it or not.
A couple days later, Gary is walking down Chapel Street and comes across your barber shop. He had already been thinking about a haircut and then he walks in.
Gary has used Wi-Fi on the PoweredLocal mesh network before, so his phone automatically connects to the network and PoweredLocal automatically reports back to Facebook that Gary came in.
Gary is an Offline Event.
Facebook on the backend attributes Gary’s visit to a specific campaign and to that sweet ad that triggered his visit in the first place.
You know what kind of ads click with your audience, and with the data that we send back, Facebook knows how to adjust the ad distribution to target people more like Gary. And get more people into your business.
OK Lets do it. YOU + POWEREDLOCAL.
#1: Create an Offline Event in Business Manager
You need to use Facebook’s Business Manager to create and track your offline events. Please note that you must have an ad account linked to your business to use Offline Events. This may require you to create a new ad account within Business Manager.
Note, this is a fairly new feature from Facebook, so the design & layout is changing frequently and may look a little different
Once you’re in Business Manager, click on Business Settings in the top-right corner. On the Left hand side, you’ll see Data Sources and when you click that, a tab for Offline Event Sets. Click on that section and then click on the blue + Add.
Add a name and an optional description (only if you want to!) to your new Offline Event Set.
Once created, you’ll also be asked to connect it to an Ad Account — this step is necessary to make the connection between PoweredLocal and Facebook work. It won’t spend any money until you setup ads.
Following this, you will be asked to assign users to it. This step is not important.
#2 Set it up in your PoweredLocal Dashboard
Head over to https://my.poweredlocal.com/apps (the Apps & Integrations page)
Select the Offline Conversions integration.
Follow the instructions to connect to your Facebook Account.
Select the advertising account that you assigned to the Offline Event Set.
Select the Offline Event Set.
This one is optional, but we recommend it, you can assign an average spend per customer here. This will help with optimisation.
#3 Let the magic happen
Next just sit back and let the Wi-Fi users generate some data that will automatically populate in your Facebook Offline Events.
#4 Now get to work in you Facebook account
Once you’ve had a bunch of Wi-Fi users, head over to your Business Manager and select the ad account that you want to use to promote your venue.
In the events tab, where you created your offline events set from #1, you should be able to see the high level dashboard of your traffic.
Including; Number of people visited the venue, the match rate (i.e. how many of your visitors Facebook could find in its database), attributed events (i.e. how many visits to the venue were as a result of clicking on or viewing your ad):
This already should be enough to get started but as a savvy marketer, you can take it to the next level + if you have more than one venue running into the offline events set, read on.
1. Create a custom conversion based on the venue visits. A custom conversion will do several things for you. It will enable you to attribute offline events to specific campaigns. And more importantly, you can run your ads with Facebook optimising towards that goal at your target CPA.
To do that you need to click on the right upper corner that says create custom conversion and fill in the details as in the screenshot:
*For those who manage multiple venues, now you can segment your data for each individual venue. In order to do so, a slight modification to the rules has to be made per the screenshot below:
Venue page id string can be found at https://my.poweredlocal.com/pages (or the Pages tab in your dashboard). Click the edit sign of a page. Then click on Preview in a separate window. The page_id will be the end of the url string. For example in URL: http://login.poweredlocal.com/179e8318-0e88-44e2-a825-5f4dabfc0b7 the page_id string is 179e8318–0e88–44e2-a825–5f4dabfc0b7
Now that you know how to do this, use this conversion when creating a new ad set in Facebook.
2. In the next example we’ll show you how to create an audience of people who’ve visited your venue. This will allow you to do two important things. Firstly, you can use this audience to exclude people who visited your business from targeting and save money when running brand awareness campaigns. And secondly, you can create a lookalike audience of your venue visitors. Where you can tell Facebook — show my ads to people who don’t know my venue, but who are very similar to my existing customers.
To do this you need to click on the upper right corner that says create audience, select custom audience and fill in the details as per the screenshot below:
*For those who manage multiple venues a slight modification to the rules has to be made per the screenshot below — use the guide from step 1 above to get the Venue page ID String:
Its possible to adjust the a period in days that you want to pull your results from to satisfy different requirements by adding a number in the During the Past field.
To approximate high value customers, you can play with the audience settings and create a subset of people who visited your place more than 2 or 3 times.
You can also create 2 audiences — one audience who visited exactly 1 time and one audience that visited ≥ 1 time and then exclude one from another during ads targeting. The number of strategies is only limited by your desire to experiment.
We will leave you here to run your own experiments and measure how social campaigns drive traffic to your venue with Facebook and PoweredLocal.
Feel free to comment below and let us know what you are trying and what has worked for you.
Michael Jankie is chief executive and co-founder of PoweredLocal, an end-to-end provider of Wi-Fi to small businesses.
