Facebook unveils new measurement tools for retailers

The tools are intended to drive visits to shops, as well as measure the visits and in-store sales following a Facebook mobile advertising campaign. 

Local Awareness adverts show people shops nearest to them and offer calls to action such as ‘get directions'. A new shop locator function within these adverts shows a map of all locations that a business has nearby, which people can click on to see information about nearby locations. 

Shop visits, a new metric in adverts reporting, allows advertisers to better understand shop traffic after having run a Local Awareness advert. It can be used to see how many people visit a shop after having seen the campaign, to optimise ad creative, delivery and targeting based on shop visits, and to analyse results across shops and regions to plan and optimise future campaigns.

Another added feature, the offline conversions API, allows businesses to match transaction data from their customer database or point-of-sale system to adverts reporting.