Tying Social Spend to Offline Sales Got Harder When Meta Quietly Halted Tracking Tool

Meta, when it was still known as Facebook, quietly discontinued a suite of store-visit tools. Since the switch earlier this year, marketers have been trying to piecemeal ways to tie social spend to offline activity in order to keep proving the value of social media marketing. The features, which included the Store Visits Optimization and Reporting and other related tools, allowed social marketers to measure how a campaign on Facebook or Instagram resulted in in-store foot traffic. The tools had been in beta mode for more than four years. “We tested this product and found over time that it wasn’t used often nor did it perform well for advertisers and decided to discontinue the test," a Meta spokesperson told Adweek, adding, "We continue to guide advertisers to use tools like the Awareness Objective, which helps build consumer awareness for their products or services." While it’s unclear how many marketers used the tool, those who relied on it said it filled a unique function for Meta: measuring in-store impact of a social campaign. Jonathan Molina, director of paid social at Group M, said Meta's tool relied on aggregate data from location services such as GPS, Bluetooth signals and modeling to trace foot traffic. The tool did not allow marketers to see specific people or exact store visits, and as a result, relied to some degree on statistical modeling. Cookie Quest: How the Ad Industry Tackled Identity in 2021 “It really speaks to the chaos of the paid social industry that there isn’t a one-to-one solution,” said Molina. Meta told advertisers that store-visit optimization and reporting tools for new campaigns would be discontinued on April 1, according to communications from Meta reviewed by Adweek, which were shared on the condition of anonymity. The program was completely phased out in May. It's the latest blow to marketers' ability to gauge campaign effectiveness. Advertisers have already been adapting to loss of Apple's mobile identifiers since the tech giant updated its privacy policy in April. Marketers are also preparing for Google's phase-out of third-party cookies in 2023. And while most commerce occurs offline—ecommerce made up only 12.4% of all retail sales in the third quarter—social marketers have relatively few tools to understand the impact of their ads, said Greg Sterling, vice president of market insights at mar-tech platform Uberall. “There’s no good solution for Facebook marketers to tie together the digital and the off-line,” Sterling said. Other alternatives While Meta's size and status make it well-placed to offer this type of solution, other platforms do offer similar capabilities. Google has a store-visit conversion tool that allows marketers to see whether users, who have signed in with their Google accounts, have visited stores after seeing an ad on the platform. For Google to track the user, he must opt into location history in their account settings, which limits the data set, said Delphine Hernoux, chief data and analytics officer, North America at Wavemaker. Snap also offers a similar capability called Snap to Store and Snap Foot Traffic insights. The latter is currently in closed beta mode and gives retailers metrics about who has visited the store, unconnected to whether they looked at any ads on the platform, according to Snap corporate communications manager Nikki Merkouris. The feature works when users log into the app in a geofenced store. Then Snap provides a variety of metrics about groups of visitors over particular time periods, Merkouris said. Ivonnie Dulce, group director of social at Nexstar Digital, said her team has focused more on Snap, in part because Meta no longer permits users to track store visits. GroupM's Molina said he can only achieve the exact same capabilities as the Meta tool with third-party services, which makes the process more fragmented. And even if marketers turn to other platforms, Meta is still an essential part of most social ad budgets, with the platform on track to account for 24% of digital ad revenue in 2021, according to eMarketer. “Social marketing now serves a new role within marketer’s needs as a reach and digital traffic driver,” Molina said in an email. “Store-visit tracking as a strategy is still essential to advertisers and is now only achievable through business partnerships with third-party services.” While Meta's foot-traffic tool might not have been widely adopted by marketers, as it was still a feature in beta mode, it was still powerful given Meta's dominant market position. “Attribution capabilities and the ability to see which of these channels is driving real-world value, and it’s something Facebook marketers [could use],” Sterling said. 3 Ways to Get More Impact From Social Commerce