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Facebook built on its existing location-based ad tools and Canvas ad offerings, by introducing two ad tools that should help marketers reach their intended audience and drive e-commerce sales.
The first tool is a location-based ad tool that allows advertisers to target users based on their offline activities including visits to brick-and-mortar stores, in-store purchases, and calls to businesses. These build on Facebook tools that let advertisers measure offline conversion — that's vital data, given that e-commerce represented just 8.5% of retail sales in Q1 2017.
- This allows Facebook to capitalize on the growth of location-based advertising,
- The release of the tool also reflects the growing number of companies emphasizing location based-advertising services.
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The second tool is a new Canvas ad template, which is designed to help turn Facebook into more of a product-discovery platform. It's called the Canvas “Collection” ad template — canvas ads are full-screen ads that can contain videos and calls to action — that features a collection of images with tagged products available for purchase. Facebook plans on building out its marketplace section, which would also help its goal of becoming a product discovery platform.
Shoppable photo tags are becoming increasingly popular among digital platforms. For example, Pinterest rolled out a feature that tags products within photos to allow for user purchasing, which is, in essence, the same as Facebook’s new Canvas ad template offering. Additionally, Instagram started testing shoppable photo tags with certain brands in November 2016. Shoppable photo tags will likely become more prominent as users increasingly post and engage with photo posts on Facebook, and as the camera becomes an increasingly prominent factor of social platforms.
Kevin Gallagher, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on ad tech that:
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