Do you run campaigns for clients with online and offline sales? Are you tracking those conversions? Today, Stefan Des, Co-founder and CEO of LeadsBridge – a suite of automation tools for Facebook advertisers, shows you why you need to track these conversions for your clients and how to do it.
Facebook has been an amazing advertising platform for marketers and business owners. With Facebook’s different online conversion tracking features, you will know where your leads and sales are coming from. This makes it easy for businesses to track and measure sales online.
However, what happens when you have a business that operates both online and offline? How do you track your leads and sales offline?
For example, if you have conversations with your prospective customers on the phone or through email and they make purchases in your offline store, how would you track it?
Inability to track offline sales has made it difficult to know which ad campaigns are driving sales and which ones are not.
Facebook solved this problem by introducing a new feature that enables you to track your sales offline. It is called Facebook Offline Conversions.
I’m going to show you how to improve your lead generation results through the use of Facebook Offline Conversions in your marketing strategy.
But before we start, let’s take a look what Facebook Offline Conversions is all about.
What is Facebook Offline Conversions?
According to Facebook:
“With offline conversion measurement on Facebook, you can track when transactions occur in your physical retail store and other offline channels (ex: orders made over the phone) after people see or engage with your Facebook ad.”
Facebook Offline Conversions enables you to know which offline events, such as purchases in your physical store and orders made through the phone or email, take place as a result of your Facebook ads.
With this feature, you can track sales, event attendance, consultations or phone calls anywhere a pixel cannot track. It’s a great way to track your client’s prospective customers wherever they are (i.e. on mobile devices, desktop or laptop computers, etc.) and how they’re engaging your client’s business.
Who can use Facebook Offline Conversions?
Facebook offline conversions is specifically designed for businesses with physical or “brick and mortar” locations. These include restaurants, gyms, E-commerce products stores, dentists, lawyers, health care providers, chiropractors, etc.
Why do you need to use Facebook Offline Conversions for your business?
With Facebook offline conversions, it’s easy to measure the performance of your Facebook ads – whether it is a sale in the store, a booking over the phone or an in-person meeting.
If your client has a business with a physical location, you can track the number of sales they make at that location as a result of your Facebook ad campaign. This will enable you to understand which campaigns generate more sales and be able to calculate your client’s return on investment.
You can create Facebook ads based on offline successes. You can do this by targeting high-value customers with the aid of the custom audience and lookalike audience features on Facebook. This will enable you to get new leads and more sales for your client’s business.
You can use the data from your offline conversions to further retarget buyers with the next product you want them to buy.
How Facebook Offline Conversions Work
When people sign up to use Facebook, their data is stored on the platform. Whenever they want to use the platform they have to log into their accounts. It is practically impossible for anyone to use Facebook without identifying themselves. Also, they cannot see Facebook ads without being identified.
This implies that Facebook knows when people click or view your ad on its platform. They know their names, locations, email addresses and other relevant details about them.
Now, supposing your client sells cars in a physical dealership and you’re running a Facebook ad for them, promoting their business.
A prospective customer sees the ad and locates your client’s dealership. They test-drive the car and make the purchase. Of course, you will have the details of the customer (name, address, email, phone number, etc.) before you finalize the sale.
Since you have the customer’s details and Facebook also has similar information about that customer, with the aid of the Facebook Offline Conversions feature, Facebook will match the information together to know whether the customer saw or clicked your Facebook ads before visiting your client’s physical store.
This would give you an idea of how much income your ads are generating, as well as the best type of ads that are generating leads vs. revenue.
For example, you set up two ads on Facebook for your client’s car sales and one of them brings in lots of leads but low sales while the second ad brings in low leads but high conversion. By tracking these ads offline, you will know which of your ads is effective and whether your ad spends are generating revenue.
Let’s take a look at a real example:
Anton Sport
Anton Sport is a high-end sporting equipment retailer of premium sporting goods like skiing equipment, running shoes, bicycles, etc.
They wanted to increase their in-store sales by using the Facebook Offline Conversions solution. The company uses the solution to match its online and offline sales and marketing efforts. This helps it to close the gap between Facebook ads and in-store sales tracked by its CRM system.
In doing this, they were able to optimize their ads using offline data collected by the company’s CRM and reach existing customers with products that are relevant to them.
They ran their campaign for three months. During this period, they pulled data from online and offline sources and used the data to optimize their Facebook ads to drive more in-store sales.
This resulted in a 42% increase in year over year revenue and 50% decrease in the overall marketing budget.
How to Set Up Facebook Offline Conversions
There are two major ways to set up your Facebook offline conversions:
- Facebook’s Business Manager
- LeadsBridge
Using the Facebook Business Manager is a long and complicated process, while using LeadsBridge is simpler and easier. Below are the two processes:
Facebook Business Manager
Setting up your Facebook Offline Conversion solution through the Business Manager requires that you have the following:
- A Facebook Business Manager account
- The Facebook app
- The Business Manager system
- Offline event setup
Follow the steps below to set up your Facebook Offline Conversion:
- Go to the business manager menu and create an “offline event set”. To do this, Select “offline events”. It will lead you to “offline event manager.”
- Click “create offline event set.”
- Type in the “name and description” for your event set, accept the terms and conditions and click on “create.”
- Select the “ad accounts” that should be assigned to the offline event set.
- Ensure that you keep the auto-tracking feature on to automatically track offline conversions for your campaigns.
- It is time to upload your “offline events” so that Facebook can match it with users. To do this, click “upload offline events” and accept the terms.
Upload your CSV or TXT file containing the name, time, value, currency and 17 other identifiers as shown in the image below:
Facebook will use the identifier to match your offline events to your campaigns.
- Map your data to the identifiers and click on “Upload”.
- Associate your offline event set with an ad. You can do this by using the power editor.
Make sure that you select the offline event set under “tracking” and pick the set you want to associate with the ad.
That’s it. Facebook will now check your uploaded data against the people that view your ad and then attribute conversions to your ads.
LeadsBridge
LeadsBridge provides an easier and simpler way to set up your Facebook Offline Conversions through its LeadsBridge offline conversions sync tool.
It enables you to know where your customers are coming from, track every stage of your sales funnel and calculate your campaign ROI.
LeadsBridge connects with Facebook and integrates with more than 200 CRMs and Autoresponders. All you need do is to select your CRM on LeadsBridge and we will do the rest for you.
Once you’ve got your LeadsBridge system set up to track your offline conversions, you’ll be able to see them in your FunnelDash account. This additional data will show you which of your campaigns are most effective and help you increase your clients’ ROI.
Want to Learn More About How to Manage The Ad Accounts for High-Ticket Clients?
Whether you’re handling off-line conversions or online conversions for your clients, you need to know how to get the clients who are spending a lot on Facebook ads and will pay you well to run them.
Unfortunately, you may be making one or more of 4 critical mistakes that can hold you back from landing these clients for your own agency.
We’ve got a new workshop that will explain all 4 of these mistakes and show you how to change the way your agency operates so you’re no longer stuck working with clients who don’t appreciate what you do for them and don’t pay you what you’re worth.
Click on the button below to find out more.
Now it’s your turn. Do you already use Facebook Offline Conversions? How is it working out for you? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
