Dive Brief:

• StitcherAds, a Facebook and Instagram Marketing Partner, released a commerce solution that integrates first-party point-of-sale data from retailers with Facebook’s offline API to target offline purchases via online ads, per a press release today. StitcherAds’ clients are attributing up to 27% of in-store customers to paid social media engagement.
• The solution matches retailers’ customers with Facebook users and finds out who in that overlapping group saw or clicked on social media ads. Retailers can use that knowledge to optimize campaigns around increasing foot traffic, and the information can also be used for audience building for retargeting campaigns and uncovering look-alike segments.
• StitcherAds reports its solution matched retailer data with Facebook users at up to 93% accuracy, and retailers achieved the results with spending as little of 5% of the total marketing budget allocated to the in-store objective.

Dive Insight:

Consumers are spending more time on social media even as in-store shopping is still by-and-far the most popular purchasing channel. The challenge for retailers, then, has been understanding if the ads they buy on social media are working and driving consumers into their stores. The picture has only just begun to get clearer over the past few months, but the potential impact could be significant if several new solutions prove effective. It's still early days for targeting offline purchases via social media ads so brick-and-mortar retailers should pay close attention to how this space evolves and begin testing. 

StitcherAds, a Facebook and Instagram Marketing Partner, is offering marketers a turnkey solution for addressing the issue of offline attribution using Facebook’s offline API. Last month, Facebook rolled out new targeting options bridging offline activities and online ads offering marketers target audiences of people who had previously made offline purchases and people who make in-store visits. The data for the new options come from Facebook’s offline conversions tool along with its users who keep location services enabled on their phones. Facebook began testing the new targeting audiences in August.

In June, Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) announced it had partnered with Snapchat, Spotify, Twitter and Pinterest to provide CPG marketers with measurements on the in-store impact of advertising on the partner social media platforms. The measurements were based on combining Nielsen’s retail sales and consumer panel data and NCS’s shopper database of more than 90 million U.S. households.