Facebook Partners With Shopper Tracking Systems To Lure Advertisers

The American social network operator has collaborated with Marketo and Square to find out who visited a shop..

Facebook has found out a method to keep a check on buyers by partnering with point-of-sale systems such as Marketo and Square that will show who purchased what after viewing the American social media service provider’s advertisements. Even if one doesn’t purchase anything, the company will now also find out who went to a shop based on a newly introduced feature that matches WiFi, beacons, GPS, cell towers with brick-and-mortar coordinates and radio signals.

This data could make advertisers spend a greater amount of money on the social network platform as it will be in a position to demonstrate precisely how advertisement views led to foot traffic as well as in-store purchases. 90% of sales yet happen in conventional brick-and-mortar shops, not online. The Menlo Park based organization is trying to evolve the delicate metrics of the industry such as clicks and ad views, towards determining when ads really inspired purchases everywhere.

The Offline Conversions application program interface could help the social network operator battle with search company Google for ad revenue. The search engine operator has had shop visit metrics for Adwords for two years now and lately launched advertisements that show users maps of nearby areas. The social networking company will need to point out its deep data collection regarding the identity of people and what they are interested in, and all advertisement inventory in its famous News feed to attract advertisers.

Though the networking organization keeps the anonymity of users intact and aggregates the data to safeguard privacy, the fact that there is no particular opt-out option is a little unsettling. All one can do is to hide specific ads one sees in his or her feed, or switch off location facilities for the organization completely, which people who get pissed out may do even it damages any other functionality of Facebook. Up till now, advertisers had to ambiguously correlate increases in sales with local ad purchases.

Even the organization’s partnerships with offline shopping data providers such as Datalogix  did not produce nearly as specific data. But this newly introduced Offline Conversions API lets the organization directly jack into E-commerce sales software as well as cash registers both online and in-store and demographic insights to enhance upcoming ad campaigns. To fuel advertisement buys trying to get foot traffic.

The organization has also a new Store Locator advertisement unit. It can show the nearby conventional stores of a business at the end of an advertisement carousel and allow people to “Get Directions”.  Instead of needing to leave the organization to go to the store locator of an unfamiliar website, users can find the hours, address, website, phone number as well as expected travelling time for every shop without quitting the social platform.