Attribution is one of the toughest parts of the marketing cycle to measure ( we’ve even proposed ways to help solve the problem ). According to attribution software company Bizible, 74.6% of marketers use some attribution model, but only 27.6% say they chose their attribution model specifically to measure ROI by channel. Those stats go to show you that marketers are still trying to figure out the best way to connect what’s effective.

When it comes to offline conversions, the puzzle gets even more complicated. Facebook’s Lead Ads were created to help marketers acquire leads on mobile easily. But until now, it was hard to track if the lead acquired through Facebook ever resulted in greater business impact - such as becoming a customer.

Facebook Launches CRM Sync and Offline Tracking for Lead Ads

Facebook announced Offline Conversion , which allows you to connect your CRM, Marketing Automation, POS, or call center system to your Facebook ad campaigns, essentially closing the loop between a digitally-captured lead and a non-digital conversion such as a sales conversation. With this information, marketers can finally give attribution to the ads that are driving business results.

Offline Conversion works for all advertising objectives, so you can implement it across the board immediately. No slow roll outs for this one! The most obvious application includes uncovering the actual performance of lead-focused ads and adjusting your strategy based on results, but marketers should also consider the ability to target high-value customers by creating Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences based on who converted previously.

Finally, marketers should test running retargeting campaigns to existing customers and present them with additional products or services that complement their past purchase.

How to Set Up Facebook Offline Conversions

As we mentioned before, Offline Conversion capabilities are available to everyone now. There are three ways to connect your data to Offline Conversion:

1. Use Facebook’s native offline event manager and upload the outcome of your leads, as tracked and recorded by another applicable platform. This process is also how you’ll upload information from your POS or call center systems.
2. If you use Salesforce, Marketo, or Zapier you’re in luck – these Facebook partners participated in the beta test and have built a direct integrations with Offline Conversion offering. These links will get you started: Marketo , Leadsbridge , Zapier .
3. Though more advanced, you can also use the Offline Conversion API to connect your CRM .

Step 1) Setting Up Offline Events

In the Business Manager menu, select Offline Events to go to Offline Event Manager

Step 2) Create Offline Event Set

Click Create Offline Event Set to create a new offline event set (see top right hand corner)

Step 3) Name Your Event Set

Enter a Name and Description for your event set, and then click Create

Step 4) Upload Offline Events

Upload your offline events, which are business events that happen outside of Facebook, your website, or your app.

Step 5) Select Your Data Source

Select your Data Source which is either a csv or txt file, or you can copy and paste your information.

Step 6) Edit Your Data Mapping

Make sure you have columns for the Event Name and Event Time or else it won't work. See here on how to properly set up your file .

Step 7) Upload Data

Facebook Hashed Upload and Creation

Step 8) Use Offline Events

Once you've completed the upload process, Facebook will show you the results of your manual uploads. In this example, we uploaded our Q1 blog subscribers as an offline event. As you can see, we had a 46% match rate. It's actually a little higher, because of the 13,800 emails only 10,535 of them are mailable. So the match rate is closer to 60%.

Step 9) Add Events as a Column in Ads Manager

Use Offline Events to evaluate performance. Head back over to Ads Manager and select the preset columns called Offline Conversions .

Step 10) Analyze Performance

It will take a few minutes to populate the data, but if there are any leads that can be attributed back to your Facebook campaigns this is where they will show up. You can also add in custom columns if you have a particular way you want to see the metrics.

Results and Expert Opinions

Here’s how Offline Conversion has already proven its worth. Marketo, which builds marketing automation software, used Offline Conversion to adjust campaigns in real-time according to downstream results and saw a 15% cut in their cost per qualified lead .

Soso Sazesh, Founder and CEO of Growth Pilots had this to say about Facebook Offline Conversions:

"We're excited about this feature as we've already been leveraging offline conversion tracking for a number of our clients and have seen promising results. The single largest challenge for B2B companies that we've worked with when it comes to Facebook advertising is attribution. Facebook is such a different type of advertising channel that many B2B companies don't know how to interpret or even assess results. These new integrations will simplify an advertiser's ability to make sense of how Facebook is impacting their entire sales funnel and I expect more B2B companies will get comfortable leveraging Facebook and making it a scalable customer acquisition channel."

Looking For a Better Way to Examine Your Facebook Data?

With AdStage Report it’s easy to stay on top of results and share them with your team.
Cut hours of manual reporting time and produce the perfect, branded report.