Setting up Facebook offline conversions is a great way to track retail sales and connect in-store sales to your Facebook advertising.
You can use this data to track conversions, optimize your ad delivery, and improve your overall marketing strategy.
In this blog post, we will first cover how to set up Facebook offline conversions, then tackle some tips and tricks to making sure you are tracking offline conversions correctly, lastly, we will dive into how your ads can impact your overall marketing strategy and tactics.
What Are Facebook Offline Conversions?
Facebook defines an offline conversion as “an action people take after seeing your ad that happens offline, such as visiting a store or making a phone call.”
You can use Facebook Offline Conversions to track offline channels like:
In-store sales
Phone calls
Appointments booked
As a retail business, you can use Facebook offline conversions to track people who saw your ad, clicked, and bought at your retail store.
This could be through a Facebook event for your retail store or an ad providing directions to your store.
4 Steps To Setting Up Facebook Offline Conversions
There are four key steps to setting up Facebook Offline Conversions:
Creating your pixel
Adding the pixel to your website or App
Create your offline event sets
Upload your offline events
Creating a Pixel
The first step is to create a pixel. The Meta pixel is a piece of code that allows you to track conversions and events on your website and in this case tie in offline event data back to your ad account.
You can create the Meta pixel from your Facebook business manager account.
Creating a new pixel:
1. Go to your Pixels tab in your business settings.
2. Follow the steps to set up the tracking pixel.
3. Install the pixel code on your website or App.
Adding the Pixel to Your Website or App
Assuming you have a website for your retail store you will need to install the meta pixel on your site.
You can use an integration or tag manager tool, such as Google Tag Manager, to install your pixel code on your website or App.
You can also manually add the pixel code to your website or App.
To do this grab your pixel code, provided to you when you started setting up the pixel.
Alternatively, go to your data sources in the business settings for your business manager to continue setup.
Paste this code right before your closing </head> tag.
Continue and turn on an advanced matching.
That's it.
Create Your Facebook Offline Event Set
After you've set up your tracking pixel for your online sources the next step is to create offline event sets.
1. Log in to your Facebook account and go to the event manager.
2. Find the green, "Connect data sources" button.
3. Select Offline and connect.
4. Get Started.
5. Enter a name for your conversion.
Once you have your offline conversion event set up you can select this as a tracking option when you create your Facebook ad.
Uploading Your Facebook Offline Conversion Events
Once you have installed your pixel and set up your offline event set, you are ready to start tracking offline events.
When it comes to tracking your offline event you have three options for connecting your offline conversion with activity from your Facebook ad campaigns.
Uploading a CSV of your conversions from your store
Using the offline conversions API
Connecting via partner integrations
Uploading Facebook Offline Conversions
The easiest method for those just getting started is to upload a CSV of your offline conversion events.
You can upload a CSV file of up to 100,000 offline conversions per day.
To upload a CSV of your offline conversion events:
1. Go to the Offline Events tab in Events Manager.
2. Click, "Upload Events", in blue, to upload Facebook offline conversions directly to Facebook.
You can download Facebook's template for your upload from the top right. This can be helpful if this is your first time uploading this data to FB and wish to know what fields are required.
3. Upload your CSV.
4. Once uploaded, match your data fields. The more fields you have the more accurate your estimated match rate will be.
If you are collecting this data in-store, be sure to collect as much data as possible. Having half your customers with phone numbers and the other without will affect your match rate.
5. Once you have mapped your data you get your estimated match rate.
6. If there are any errors in your uploaded conversion data Facebook will provide you with details below in the warnings section.
7. Finally, Facebook provides you with the total uploaded rows.
Keep in mind that once you close the upload tab it make take "15 minutes" to see results.
Facebook Offline Conversion API
If you decide to connect via the Facebook API you may need help from a developer.
Before contacting the developer here is a short list of what you will need.
Business manager account, (Blog post to help you get started)
Facebook app ID
Ad Account (Our blog post on creating your ad account)
Offline event set
Creating your Facebook app ID can be fairly technical if this is not you feel free to have a dev do this.
Facebook documentation on setting up your Facebook offline conversion API can be found in the link.
Connecting Facebook Offline Conversion Via Partner Integrations
Facebook offers a wide range of partner integrations to help with offline event tracking.
Strangely not listed as a partner integration is Shopify.
Tips and Tricks for Tracking Offline Conversions
There are a few things you should keep in mind when tracking Facebook offline conversions:
Tip 1: Make sure your pixel is installed correctly. You can use the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome extension to check that your pixel is installed correctly.
Tips 2: Once uploaded you are not able to update or delete your data. So make sure the fields are as accurate as possible.
Tips 3: Facebook's offline conversion measurement abilities allow it to de-duplicate any duplicate event types. This can occur when you have an overlap for any reason in your uploads.
Tip 4: Make sure you are using the correct event_name. For example, if you are tracking offline purchases, you would use the Purchase event name.
Common Mistakes When Setting Up Facebook Offline Conversions
There are a few common mistakes that people make when setting up Facebook Offline Conversions:
Mistake 1: Not installing the pixel code correctly. Make sure you follow the instructions carefully.
Mistake 2: Make sure you are mapping your offline events to the correct Facebook ad. In your hurry to upload your data an easy mistake is to map the wrong fields. This will result in a low match rate.
Mistake 3: Your event_name can be anything you want it to be. For offline purchases, Purchase, for leads, Leads.
Keep in mind that all event names are camel case this means if you use Dial In you will get an error. The proper way to name this event is DialIn.
Mistake 4: Not mapping Facebook offline conversion events to ads. If you don’t map your Facebook offline conversion pixel to ads before launching, you won’t have any conversion data to match your offline channels too.
How Facebook offline Conversions Can Impact Your Overall Marketing Strategy
Facebook offline conversions can be a valuable metric to track. It allows you to build, optimize, and scale your Facebook offline ad campaigns. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Tracking Properly
Segment your ads and use proper UTMs. This will allow you to better analyze your successful ad campaigns.
Test out different calls to action and use UTMs to track the different CTA's. Are people who see your Facebook ad and look up directions more likely to buy in-store?
Lifetime Value
Track the lifetime value of your customers. This metric is important because it tells you how much revenue a customer brings in throughout their relationship with your business.
Facebook offline conversions can help with this as you can attribute more valuable or less valuable customers to Facebook.
Ultimately, having more data on your customers via UTMs on your Facebook ads as well as better LTV data from your physical retail store will allow you to allocate ad spend more efficiently.
Get Started With Facebook Offline Ads Today!
You're now ready to start a Facebook offline conversion campaign! This data will be available in the Facebook Ads Manager and event manager.
If you would like help setting up your first Facebook offline ad campaign feel free to reach out for a free consultation.
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