Facebook is launching two related products for local businesses. One is a free analytics tool called “Local Insights” that shows small business owners foot traffic around their stores. The other is an update to Local Awareness Ads that allows businesses with at least five locations to dynamically make their campaigns on Facebook more locally relevant by pre-populating location information.
The latter capability allows brands and multi-location businesses to leverage the location data already in their individual store or location Pages to dynamically feed store location (and related information) into Local Awareness Ads. (This provides a powerful reason to create location Pages if brands don’t already have them.)
The analogy is location and call extensions in AdWords. In its blog post, Facebook provided an example of how a business with multiple locations would use this new dynamic capability:
If a cafe with multiple locations in the Bay Area decides to run local awareness ads, they could choose to automatically populate the city name in their ad copy, depending on where the people seeing the ad are. So, people in Menlo Park would see “Join us for lunch in Menlo Park,” while people in San Francisco would see “Join us for lunch in San Francisco.” Call-to-action buttons are also dynamic, so when someone clicks on the “Call Now” or “Get Directions” button, they’re connected to the store currently closest to them.
The idea is to simplify ad creation for multi-location businesses, as well as make ads more locally relevant to users. Multiple studies and surveys have shown that location drives higher response rates and conversions than ads without location.
Most of those locally driven conversions will be offline, especially where mobile users are concerned. As I’ve repeatedly mentioned, the vast majority of retail sales (93 percent) continue to happen in physical stores. In addition, nearly 80 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue now comes from mobile. The company’s most engaged users are also mobile.
The Local Insights tool is not directly tied to the new dynamic features in Local Awareness Ads. Businesses with a single location can use it but it will be especially valuable to multi-location marketers. Facebook advertisers will start to be able to connect the dots between their online ads and foot traffic to their various store locations.
To access Local Insights business owners go to Page Insights, which now has a tab (above) that shows data about Facebook users near their locations. While the tool doesn’t track in-store visits, it will show “aggregate demographics and trends associated with the people nearby.”
There are also valuable operational insights that can come from this data. For example, marketers can learn more about who’s nearby (age, gender, tourists vs. locals) and when activity around their locations is heaviest (hours and staffing implications).
When combined with Local Awareness Ads, marketers can start to understand whether those ads are driving store visits and whether the ads are targeted to audiences that are most likely to come into a store.
Facebook points out that Local Insights will only capture data anonymously and only from people who have location services enabled (on Facebook). There’s no personal information is being captured and exposed.
Facebook says that these Local Awareness Ad updates will be available via its API and soon through Power Editor. Local Insights analytics are rolling out over the next few weeks.
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