Dive Brief:

• Facebook added a tool this week to help marketers learn more about how ad campaigns generate sales leads in offline settings like a store, telephone call or in-person meeting. Marketers can connect their customer relationship management, point-of-sale or call center systems to Facebook’s new Offline Conversion feature to help monitor ads, the company said in a blog post.
• In addition to attributing success to the right channels, Facebook noted that the more granular information lets marketers understand the non-digital outcomes of a campaign, including which lead ads are more effective at driving bottom-line results. That kind of data can help to target high-value customers from the prior month using custom audiences and look-alike audiences while excluding in-store purchasers to find new local prospects.
• Facebook said brands must have its Business Manager application and other information to help track sales leads. Salesforce.com, Marketo, Leadsbridge and Zapier are among the CRM systems that can be connected to Facebook.

Dive Insight:

Facebook, Google and Amazon have individual advantages in the way they connect marketers and customers, with Facebook’s key asset being the vast amount of personal information the social network has collected on 2 billion people. While that information is useful in helping marketers reach target audiences, the effectiveness of ad campaigns is still mostly measured with traditional metrics like clicks. But in order to gain a more accurate assessment of an ad's return on investment, marketers need to know how it drove offline activities. This is especially true for retailers as the lion's share of sales still happen at a physical store. 

Facebook recognizes that marketers want deeper attribution insights, and its lead tracking capabilities promise to provide more information about how marketers can effectively move along “the path to converting a lead into a customer,” the company said. For a car company, that means refining ad campaigns to drive dealer visits, while a for-profit college may seek to push for more applicants.

The new tool is a big improvement to Facebook's Lead Ads, which basically acted as an auto-fill service that gathered key contact information about sales prospects. An offline conversion tracker can help marketers optimize ad campaigns and experiment with design changes and call-to-action messages to see what drives the best results.