Offline conversions help you gain more insight into how online campaigns drive offline sales. Through offline conversions, you can track transactions from physical shops or other offline channels that were triggered by a Facebook campaign. This is achieved by matching the transactions from your customer database or point-of-sale system with Facebook ads reporting.
Offline conversions can be broken down into three parts:
In Smartly.io you can use offline events in optimization rules and in Predictive Budget Allocation.
❕Note that using offline conversions requires whitelisting from Facebook's side.
Creating offline event sets
In order to measure offline conversions, you first have to create offline event sets in Business Manager. A step-by-step guide on how to set these up can be found from Facebook instructions.
We recommend that you select Auto-Tracking when creating the event sets, as this will activate offline conversion tracking in all active and future campaigns. When creating and editing campaigns in Smartly.io, you can activate or deactivate these offline conversions in the Tracking section, as shown in the screenshot below.
Uploading offline events
Offline events can be uploaded on Facebook's side either manually via the Offline Event Manager or via the Offline Conversion API. Uploading via the API is recommended since it allows sharing and using Offline Event Sets across ad accounts.
Transaction data should be uploaded within 62 days of the conversion.
Tracking results
The offline conversion metrics can be seen in Smartly.io Reporting and in the campaign overview when selecting the "offline conversions" from Customize Columns/Table.
Store Sales Optimization
Using Offline Conversions as the optimization goal is called "Store Sales Optimization" (SSO). The availability might be limited. If you're eligible, you'll see the Store Sales option in bidding:
If you can't see the option, contact your Smartly.io account manager for more information.
Store Sales Optimization requires at least 1000 attributed (7-day view-through) conversions in the past month to work.
FAQ
What is the added value of using offline conversions?
By providing Facebook offline conversions, you can track when transactions occur in your physical retail store and other offline channels (e.g. orders made over the phone) after people have seen or engaged with your Facebook ads. This way you can track transactions from physical stores or other offline channels that were actually triggered by a Facebook campaign.
By using offline conversions, you are also providing Facebook more data about the items that you have sold and to whom, which helps Facebook's optimization algorithm in building more relevant audiences for your ads.