Advanced Recipe of Facebook Store Visit Campaign & Ads Optimization

Facebook has produced some awesome campaign results in terms of store visits. Based on my experience of running the Facebook Store Visits Campaign, here are some of the tips that I want to share with you which will help you in optimizing your store visit campaign.

Store Visits Campaign Eligibility

However, before you decide on running the store visit campaign on Facebook, you should be aware that the store visits objective is available to anyone who has the location structure in place. But, Store Visits optimization, the reporting that pulls in the store visits number, is only available to a select number of advertisers based off of thousands of signals and is currently in beta (with no opportunity to whitelist of request).

The best way to check if you are eligible or not is to look at the store visits metrics in your Facebook Ads manager. If you have all the locations uploaded and approved by Facebook and you also have some campaign performance data, then you should also have store visits data. If you do not have them, then your ad account is not approved. Here is a screenshot of the account with no Store visits measurement.

No Store Visits Data on Facebook

Facebook determines an advertiser’s eligibility based on whether it can detect foot traffic well enough at an advertiser’s physical locations to offer them Store Visits Measurement product. An advertiser is eligible if Facebook can provide high-quality foot-traffic reporting to them and they are ineligible if not. Also to become eligible, 75% of your locations have to have enough signal to have the optimization.

Store Visit Lifetime Budget

Campaign Objective

Campaign budget under the campaign objective should be chosen as “lifetime budget” instead of the daily budget. There are certain reasons why I suggest so:

  • With a lifetime budget, you can schedule your campaigns as per the store timing. You do not want to run the ads 24/7. However, if you select the “daily budget” option, you won’t be able to schedule your ads.
  • Other than that, giving facebook lifetime budget is like giving Facebook the autonomy to decide that on which hours of the day and day of the week, Facebook wants to spend the most budget based on the target audience engagement and interaction.

In the screenshot below, you can see that selecting a lifetime budget, gives the option for ad scheduling

Lifetime budget & Ad Scheduling

Sample test with a few locations

After the campaign settings have been done, you will be doing the AdSets settings. Before you start driving in-store visits through the facebook campaign, it’s better to test your hypothesis with a few locations. Once you have uploaded all your locations in the Business settings under Facebook Ads Manager, you can create a location test for targeting.

AdSet Settings for new location set

Once you select a few locations, let’s say 3 to 4 locations, to run the sample test campaign, remember a few pointers:

  • You will be asked to set a location radius targeting, do not let the radius targeting of nearby locations overlap. Overlapping the location might attribute the store visit data wrongly to the campaign
  • When creating a location set, select the store locations with similar timings. That way, it will be easier to Schedule your AdSet at once.

Store Visit Offer

Another important setting under AdSets settings is Offer settings in where you create an offer. In the above picture, you can see that the offer tab is switched off. Once you turn that on, you will be given an option to create an offer.

Filling up offer details

In Store Offer Details

Offer Title

Make the offer title exclusive for the In-Store audience with a CTA button. For Example, “Costco Sales Drive – 30% Off on Next Purchase”. Things that you have to make sure that your target users should know that there is a sales drive that’s going on and it’s only available at the physical mortar and brick store.

Offer Details

Under offer details, you can talk about discounts on different categories. For example, you can specify the discount on furniture, outdoors, patio, mattress, etc. You should not put the terms and conditions here as there is a separate field for terms and conditions. Under the offer details, you can also mention the number of people this offer is valid for.

For example, this offer could be valid for the first 1000 store visitors. You will get the idea of the number of offers available in the later section. Also, make sure to mention the above number at the beginning of the offer details.

Offer Dates

It’s important to give an offer date. An offer expiry date creates a sense of urgency in your target audience. You can even sub-divide your strategy based on the offer end date. For a campaign that’s going to run for almost a month, you can give a lower offer for the first three weeks. In the last week, you can up your offer and in the offer title, you can write something such as “Last one week”, “season’s last offer” etc which can even create a greater sense of urgency.

Promo Code

There are three options for the promo code:

  • No Code
  • One Code
  • Unique code

I would not suggest using No code for the offer. It should either be One Code or Unique Codes. No Code can be used for giveaways. You might also be interested in Holiday campaigns on Facebook.

Promo Code: One Code

One code is valid across all the stores. That means you just create custom code and decide the total number of availability for that particular code. One Code for in store purchase

 

Promo Code: Unique Code

You can use even unique codes for unique stores if you are offering different discounts at different stores. For Unique codes, you need to upload the list of the unique codes on the platform. Some of the strategical implementations of the unique codes would be to

  • Drive traffic to a new store or less performing store
  • Offer different discounts to a particular set of people/ in area

Unique Codes Promo Code in store visits

Offer Advanced Options

Under the advanced options, you can put in the terms and conditions. You can hide the option to share the offer and you can even make the offer being accepted at certain locations.

Offer for locations

Store Visit Ad Voice

Ad Voice will be the first thing that you will first encounter under the Ad Settings. Ad Voice basically sets the tone of the messaging. It could either set the tone from a global brand or as a local brand. Here is how the Ad Settings look like

Ad Settings

As you can see at the top of the above image, there are two options to set the tone of your ads: Main Page or local page. When you upload the list of the business locations under the business settings on Facebook, Facebook automatically creates different pages for the local stores. Some of the main differences between using the main page and local pages are:

  • Page name used – Main brand name page vs local page name
  • Clicking on the ad takes people to the main page or local page
  • Likes and comments on the post appear at the global level or based on the closest page
  • However, directions and phone numbers will always be for the local page

Here on Facebook, I searched for “JYSK” from Vancouver and I can see the results in which based on different business locations, there are different pages

multiple Pages for a brand based on store location

multiple Pages for a brand based on the store location

Store Visit Ad Creative

Next important part under the Ad Settings is Ad creative. There are a lot of discussions around kind of creatives that we can use. Different marketers prefer different creative types based on the product or service that is being marketed and the target audience. Some of the best performing creatives for this case has been a short video ad with a call to action at the end of the video or a single image ad. Other than the creative type, there are also other components of the ad creative which should also be taken in the consideration

ad creative options for store visits

ad creative options for store visits

Some of the highlighted parts from the above picture are

  • The map card – I would suggest keeping the main offer at the front or on the first carousel and second card could be the card which shows the map to the store. By default, Facebook also suggests map card at the second location.
  • Under the primary text, you can already see that facebook utilizes the local page street address and city location in order to drive people there and customize the messaging.
  • You can also see that after you select the ad voice as local page, the page name changes to the nearest local page.
  • Other than that, you can also see the get offer button as well as the expiry date.

Audience Targeting

I am sure you must have different audience targeting on your mind. I would just like to highlight that you can also create a custom audience on Facebook Ads Manager with offline activities such as visiting the stores and making a store purchase. You can also create a lookalike audience of the same custom audience and target them at the AdSet level.

Store Visit Audience on Facebook

Ad Placement

For the Store visit ads, I would not recommend automatic ad placement. I would rather recommend manual ad placement in which you should advertise only on the mobile devices if you want people to drive to your store. If you can any other strategy or advice that you would like others to know, please put that down in the comments below.

FB Store Visit Campaign Result

  • The AdSets/ Ads should not be replaced with new copies and creatives too often. This gives the platform a lesser time to learn and optimize the campaign. Instead of short deals, Facebook Store visit campaign should have monthly or seasonal deals which can last longer
  • If you are trying to test within a target reach with limited reach, your total budget might not get spent.
  • Also, due to the limited audience reach, a new audience might not be reached after a certain period of time. Due to the above factor, ad frequency will keep on going higher and higher, resulting in recycling the same set of the audience. Learn here more about the Facebook Audience saturation
  • Ad Frequency for Store visit campaign optimizes at a higher number than a conversion-based campaign. For a conversion-based campaign, an optimized ad frequency was around 4. For Store visit campaign, an optimized ad frequency was around 6. Here is a screenshot of the same:

Store Visit Campaign Frequency and reach

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