At the beginning of 2014, an Ikea Facebook campaign drove an 11 per cent increase in foot traffic for the retailer, according to research carried out by Vizeum and iProspect in partnership with Facebook and EE.
The study matched Facebook usage and EE data over the course of two weeks, to measure the effect of a geo-targeted News Feed campaign on store visits among more than 172,000 people that were served adverts, and an equally-sized control group.
The results showed an 11% average increase in store visits from those who were served adverts, compared with an otherwise identical same-size group that had not seen the adverts.
The research measured store traffic uplift from those who had seen Ikea ads over a two-week period.
The test delivered 1.4m impressions and saw the biggest impact among 22 to 25-year-olds: there was a 31% increase in store visits among this group. The 26 to 35-year-olds were up 11% compared to the non-exposed group. These visitors gave Ikea a return on investment of 6:1 against their media spend with Facebook, which was geotargeted around Cardiff and ran for two weeks during December 2013 and January 2014.
Phillip Dyte, paid social media manager at iProspect, the agency charged with executing the campaign, explained why this methodology was unique: “Together with Facebook, Vizeum and Isobar, we worked closely to serve News Feed ads to Ikea’s Cardiff audience, ensuring we reached a statistically robust number of unique local impressions. EE then analysed device activity within a geofenced area around the Ikea store – removing staff, people who lived in the area and passers-by. The resulting figures are really clean of misleading variables.”
“Our focus is on helping retailers reach the audience most likely to be interested in their products and delivering results throughout the customer lifecycle, by driving sales both online and in-store,” said Facebook head of retail global vertical strategy Nicolas Franchet. “These latest figures provide further evidence of just how effectively Facebook enables retailers to achieve their marketing goals – whether that’s acquiring new customers or connecting with existing ones to generate incremental sales.”