Facebook Deals: Tracking Clicks To Bricks
Facebook announced a new feature yesterday called Facebook Deals that lets local merchants create offline promotions that consumers activate by checking-in to the merchant’s location through Facebook Places. What I find interesting about this is that Facebook Deals marks the first time a major online ad network will be able to efficiently track ad impressions all the way through to offline purchase conversions. That’s a big deal.
I suspect that Facebook will soon offer advertisers a way to easily promote their offline offers through Facebook Ads, one of the largest, self-serve ad networks on the web. For example, suppose you were not planning to shop this week, but logged into Facebook and saw an ad for 20% off at your local Gap this weekend. Since Facebook can track who views those ads, who clicks, and who ultimately checks-in to the local store to redeem the coupon, they can provide the Gap and other advertisers with a complete view of the performance of their online advertising spend.
Next, picture how this feature could be extended to include more sophisticated ad targeting. For example, Facebook could presumably allow advertisers to target ads only to people who have or have not previously visited their stores - what’s known as retargeting in the online ad world. Or, through Facebook Connect, partner sites could possibly access this same online-to-offline data. For example, Gap.com might know whether a visitor to their website has recently visited a brick-and-mortar store simply by making a call to the Facebook API. Presumably, Facebook could also power display ads across the web by extending their profile targeting capabilities to ad inventory outside of Facebook.com. Foursquare, Groupon, and all the other players in the online-to-offline commerce space lack the ad network and the billions of available impressions that make this possible (though I think this space is large enough for many companies to be successful).
Skeptics warn that mainstream consumers are not ready to share their location publicly online. If I were Zuckerberg, I would consider making deal check-ins private by default till people warm to the idea of sharing their location. The real near-term revenue opportunity in this feature is the ability to close the loop for online-to-offline advertising. Social sharing is just gravy. Facebook could always change the default setting for check-ins to public at a later date.
As someone who has worked in marketing and ecommerce for 15 years, I’m excited about what what this means in terms of bridging online and offline commerce and the changes it will bring for the industry.
