In recent months Facebook has been honing its ability to serve ads to people based on their locations, now enabling retailers to advertise local in-store products and promotions to nearby shoppers from their online catalogs.
These new ads are called “dynamic ads,” and they don’t just offer national or global products to shoppers when they’re near a store, they allow individual stores to let people know what’s available now.
Like Google, Facebook recognizes that when someone is searching for something local, they want local information.
“Many retailers already use Facebook ads to promote their in-store products, but until now it wasn’t feasible to customize creative for every store location based on local product availability, pricing or promotions,” the company said in its blog. “Now, with dynamic ads for retail, campaigns can dynamically showcase products available in the store that’s closest to the person seeing the ad.”
Dynamic ads give shoppers more confidence that what they want is currently available and not discontinued or out of stock, and provides access to additional product information so people can make a better decision.
The new dynamic ads expand an earlier update this year that allowed companies to link product catalogs to ad servers, making it possible to deliver ads based on products that individual shoppers were looking at or researching. Dynamic ads were first introduced to deliver relevant ads to drive online sales. Facebook is now expanding dynamic ads by combining product catalogs with geo-targeting to drive in-person sales.
“For example, people browsing an umbrella on your website may see a product ad for umbrellas or a selection of related products the next time they come back to Facebook,” the company says. Local dynamic ads “keep up to date with your business so you only show products that are in stock and at the latest price. And when a purchase is made on your site product ads are automatically turned off, across devices, so you’ll never bother your shoppers with products they’ve already purchased.”
Advertises can include a great deal of information in dynamic ads designed to help shoppers find and get what they want as quickly as possible. Information options include:
- Store locator
- Availability of advertised products
- Product summaries
- Call-to-action to purchase online, contact a store, or save a selection
- Links and suggestions for similar products that are available
Advertisers can upload their product catalog onto Facebook, and configure each product with the specific attributes that can be used to generate an ad such as a product name, number, description, landing page link, image and more.
The ads use dynamic templates, which means advertisers only need to create one ad for an entire catalog. Facebook can then automatically generates the product information listed (product name, ID, description, landing page, image, and availability) from the product catalog to fill out the content for that ad.
Dynamic ads give retailers the ability to connect product catalogs with individual shoppers with greater personalization and relevance. They can reach people with ads on any device they use, regardless of their original contact with a business.
Advertising online is becoming more and more like search engine marketing, innovating to deliver people the exact products and services that they are looking for, when they are looking, and increasingly where they are looking.
