Facebook Offline Conversions for Dummies

How to Use Them, and The Industries That Can Benefit the Most From Its Implementation

Conversions are among the most important metrics a marketer can produce.

If every transaction took place online, conversion tracking would be an oh-so-easy thing to do, similar to setting up an ad campaign, or even as simple as reading a click-through rate on a screen.

However, the reality is far from that.

On one hand, nobody really doubts that online ads are instrumental in driving countless offline events — millions of purchases and transactions taking every hour, every day, across the globe.

On the other hand, it has been very hard for marketers to establish a demonstrable connection between online ads and offline events — in other words, to show the impact online ads have on real-life actions.

The good news is that in 2016, a product was launched to help marketers prove the effectiveness of their campaigns — a problem that has been nagging the industry ever since online banner ads were invented (for the record, that was in 1995, folks).

Enter Facebook Offline Conversions.

Understanding Offline Conversions

Simply put, Offline Conversions is a data-matching feature of Facebook Ads Manager.

It uses data points called identifiers to find matches between exposure to online ads and offline actions like the purchase of a product.

Some of the most commonly used identifiers to track offline conversions include:

• Email address
• Name
• Surname
• Phone number

In total, there are more than 15 data points that can be used as identifiers, though the go-to pick is the email address.

Why is identifier data important?

Identifiers are the link between an online interaction with a Facebook ad (a view, a click) and an offline action (a purchase, a store visit) performed by the same user.

In simpler terms, identifier data is the connective tissue between an online interaction (a user clicking a Facebook ad) and the offline action that the ad intends to achieve (i.e. the same user purchasing the product featured on the ad).

An example is a good way to understand how it all works.

For purely educational purposes, let’s suppose we are helping Tesla with their marketing efforts, and that we want to track offline conversions for a Facebook Ads campaign promoting test drives of the new Tesla Cybertruck in California.

The flow of events would be:

1. We launch a Facebook Ads campaign promoting Tesla Cybertruck test drives
2. The user sees our ad
3. The user clicks on the ad and registers for the test drive using his/her email address
4. If the user shows up for the test drive (the offline event!), we update the relevant field on the CRM
5. We then compile the identifier data into a source file, and then upload it to the Facebook Offline Conversions dashboard. We can do this manually, or automate the whole process using Integromat

And bingo! Facebook will look for matches between the data in the source file and the audience that was exposed to the ads to come up with the pot at the end of the rainbow: conversion rates for offline events.

With accurate offline conversion rates, marketers can:

• Optimize ad budgets and campaigns
• Avoid showing ads of a product to people who already bought that product IRL
• Run conversion experiments and A/B tests based on location and other demographic markers

All things considered, Facebook Offline Conversions can be regarded as the farthest-reaching solution we have to bridge an air gap that is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Offline Purchases Are Here to Stay

As much as we love receiving our purchases at our doorstep, it’s not always the most practical solution.

The 2 most frequent reasons that explain a consumer’s preference to purchase some items offline are:

• See or feel the product in person
• Enjoy the buying experience and be gratified instantly

So, what kind of products fall into these categories? Thousands, actually.

But let’s focus on the 3 industries that are poised to benefit the most from applying conversion tracking campaigns via Facebook Offline Conversions.

1. Real Estate Industry

Since buyers normally like to see a house before investing in it, realtors and Facebook Offline Conversions are a natural match.

Real estate agencies running ads on Facebook can easily implement an Offline Conversions campaign to track ad conversion rates for

• Open house events
• Guided visits
• Rent, lease and sale agreements

For example, let’s say we wish to track the conversion rate of a campaign promoting an open house event. To do so, we have to:

1. Launch the ads campaign
2. See who shows up for the promoted open house
3. Get the names or email addresses of those who show up
4. Compile these into a source file and upload it to Facebook Offline Conversions
5. Check for matches

And that’s pretty much it. This way, you will know how much it costs to bring a lead to an open house event via Facebook Ads, and plan future ad campaigns accordingly.

2. Auto Industry

The same approach can be applied to the auto industry, for the simple reason that buyers often want to see and test automobiles and before purchasing them.

On top of the aforementioned example covering test drive events, marketers working with clients in the auto industry can implement Facebook Offline conversions to a growing number of campaigns and events, such as:

• Lease agreements
• Sales and deals
• Special offers
• Maintenance and repair services
• Brand-related events (i.e. anniversaries, celebrations, model presentations)

3. Retail Industry

While e-commerce has been growing at impressive rates in the past few years, around 90% of retail sales still take place offline.

In light of this, tracking offline conversions is particularly important for marketers working in the retail industry, but also a bit more challenging.

The key problem with the retail industry is related to data-gathering efforts.

Why?

Because few people will give away their email addresses when buying groceries at the supermarket, dinner at a restaurant, or a $20 t-shirt at any given store.

But there are workarounds.

For example, Facebook has been working on partnerships with Point-of-Sale system providers like Square and Lightspeed, and it is possible to track offline conversions using the data generated by these as well.

There are other workarounds as well, such as using coupons and discount codes, both of which can require the customer to provide an email address for validation purposes, and then get the necessary identifiers that will later be used to look for matches in Offline Conversions.

The Integromat Differential: Automating Facebook Offline Conversions

The ability to accurately measure offline events with Facebook Ads can pay huge dividends in product sales, but there’s a catch: the bigger the campaign, the bigger the costs.

There’s only one way to easily solve this problem, and it’s called automation.

The need for automation derives from a crucial fact: if you don’t automate the workflows related to gathering and processing data, these tasks will take a lot of time to complete and consume significant chunks of your profit margins.

On top of this, marketers considering offline conversions need to know that:

• Datasets for offline conversions are dynamic (data is collected over a period of time, not all at once)
• Data can come from (and go to) different sources, including CRM systems like HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Teamgate, or spreadsheets like Airtable and Google Sheets
• Data coming from different sources need to be consolidated in order to be used

The problem here is obvious: consolidating data flowing from multiple sources into one (or more) source file to use in one (or more) campaign is an exhausting, never-ending task when done by hand.

And here’s where Integromat comes to save the day.

Using Integromat to connect data sources and repositories (forms, spreadsheets, CRMs) to Facebook Offline Conversions marketers can automate:

• Data collection
• Data manipulation
• Data sync

The larger the dataset, the more cost-effective Integromat becomes (as a bonus, it also reduces the possibility of human error, something anyone working with data knows about).

To automate quickly, you can use our premade scenarios, or create your own for more complex, sprawling data collection efforts.

Automating workflows for Facebook Offline Conversions is quite easy once you identify sources and destinations of your data.

To conclude, we have a question for the marketing pros: do you see yourself manually consolidating large datasets as data builds up over time?

If the answer is “no”, then it is time to give Integromat a shot.

Bring all your tools together with Integromat, a web-based tool to connect apps and automate workflows using a beautiful, no-code visual builder. The inbuilt HTTP app enables you to connect to any web service or API without writing a single line of code.

Integromat’s free plan comes with all its powerful features; give it a go and you might just fall in love!