Turn your Facebook commerce into a powerful data source

Social Commerce - the new sales channel

Today 84% of shoppers review at least one social media site before making a purchase. It is hence no surprise that social commerce has become a serious term when it comes to online shopping for many retailers. 

Facebook, with their incredible 2.2 billion monthly active users, provides a massive opportunity to approach a (new) potential audience. Already in 2014, the social media platform started experimenting with ‘buy now’ button and rolled out on-site shopping a few years later.

The consumers’ growing need for more personalisation and content adapted to their specific interests creates new opportunities for retailers. Facebook can be one of them as it allows to engage with consumers at every stage of their buying journey. 

As social commerce is getting more attention, knowing what tactics to use and how to implement them can be beneficial. Also, the more Facebook commerce features and platforms arise so does the amount of data marketers need to gather, monitor, and analyse.

To turn Facebook commerce into a powerful data source is possible with the right tools. Here is a list of a handful of options that can help companies make the most out of their Facebook data and maximise their engagement with the customer. 

Processing Facebook Ads Insights

Facebook Ads is a popular advertising platform. It allows reaching the right user at a relatively low price offering massive potential for successful campaigns. Information about conversions, clicks or impressions can be viewed in Ads Manager or retrieved manually for further analysis.

To build more comprehensive reports with your data, exporting files of data can become extremely time-intensive, especially if you are running multiple advertising accounts. 

The best practice for analysing Facebook Ads data is to store them inside a data warehouse or customer data management platform. There they can be easily matched with other databases and third-party sources for analysis and activation. 

The Facebook Marketing API allows Google BigQuery to retrieve pre-defined sets of data regularly. By combining these tools, data analysis is possible nearly real-time without any extra manual work. 

Facebook offline conversions from Facebook Ads

Facebook Offline Transactions is relatively a new feature that allows advertisers to measure the full impact of their Facebook ad campaigns. Knowing how many offline sales happened after seeing a Facebook Ad is a great way to measure marketing efforts on social media.

But how does this work? Offline sales data from a specific period can be uploaded to Facebook, where they get matched with ads that people previously saw and clicked. In most cases, email is used as a unique identifier to connect the information.

A lot more can be achieved by having data from Facebook Ads, POS system or CRM structured and stored in a customer data management platform. For large companies, this is especially interesting since they have many data scattered across the organisation, and it is hard for them to get a complete view of the customer. By integrating various data sources and touchpoints, all data become available in one place, real-time. 

Lead quality optimisation 

Social media allows a lot of space for attracting customers and can be an excellent source for gaining new ones. Identifying the quality of your leads and knowing where your customers came from is an essential step for marketing strategy. 

Many companies are challenged to determine who their potential clients are and where they came from. And it is hard to control that if the data is spread across multiple tools. Connecting all data sources including Facebook and other social media allows building models and analysis for optimising lead generation quality.

Purchase order notifications via Facebook Messenger

The modern consumer wants to interact with brands anytime without having to wait for a response. They know what they want, and they want it now. Conversational commerce and automated social commerce chatbots are great methods to implement this successfully right now. 

Messenger chatbots are being utilised by lots of companies recently. Unlike webshops, where customers can only read reviews, with chat, they can also ask the bot to compare products just like the assistance they would get in-store. 

Many big brands have their chatbot on Facebook Messenger, the second most popular iOS app of all time. Customers can order and purchase a product without leaving the messaging app. 

It is also possible to set up shipping and delivery notifications directly in Facebook Messenger. To automate that process, data sources such as webshop management system, distribution and warehouse need to be connected in one data management platform.

Conclusion

Facebook offers endless possibilities to create interactions between customers and brands. Social commerce is on the rise and no matter the size of the business every brand can take advantage of it. The variety of tactics also create a large number of data to look at. Working in the cloud with well-structured data forms a good basis for making data-driven decisions.