What is the Facebook offer format?
Facebook “offer” ads is a newly updated feature proposed to businesses. Advertisers can share discount or specific offers to their customers via their Facebook page. Two formats of offers are currently available :
- Online & in Store
The offer can be redeemed online through your website or offline in your shop's location.
This is a great way to make a bridge between online advertising and offline store visits. - Online Only
The offer is only available on your website.
Similarly to boosted posts, Facebook offers can be boosted to extend the reach or to reach a specific targeting.
How to claim a Facebook offer ad?
When boosted, customers can see the offer in a post format containing a description, the offer and traditional engagement buttons. Facebook offers the possibility to hide the share option if needed.
As shown above, the call-to-action is always “get offer”. When clicked, the user automatically receives an email on his/her personal email address that is used to login to Facebook, and gets redirected to the landing page URL. The offer will also be stored on the Facebook interface. Hence, Facebook notification will be sent automatically when the offer is about to expire. This is a great update to this ad format, as you can get multiple touch points, but you will only pay per impression. The Facebook notifications will be free.
How to set up Facebook Offer ads?
First of all, you have to choose one of following marketing objective for your campaign :
- Traffic
- Conversion
After selecting your Facebook campaign objective, you will have to create an ad set. Finish setting up your ad sets and you'll see a section labeled Offer. Toggle the button to ON.
Now, Facebook will allow you to customize your offer : offer’s details, redemption and some advanced options. 
Offer’s details
Define the offer in the title, add a description of the offer and mention the start and end date. The description can not exceed 250 characters. Facebook recommends to be concise and accurate on the offer’s details.
Offer’s redemption
Choose where people can redeem the offer (online/offline), what is the final URL, the type of promo (no code, one code and unique codes). Note that “unique codes” are barcodes you created manually. Unfortunately, this option is still not available in Belgium.
Advanced options
Include some terms & conditions and possibility to hide the share option.
What are the results ?
At Semetis, we tested the new upgraded Facebook offer ads directly when it was launched.
This feature has been activated for a client who launched a new range of product and was offering a discount in his offline shops. The product was solely available offline and discount was offered thanks to an online printable coupons.
To assess the performance of the offer format, two Facebook campaigns targeting the same audience and sharing the same characteristics had been created. Both had the same objective : optimise for conversion. On one of them, we activated the Facebook offer. The other one only contained a conversion ad with a call-to-action motivating people to go to the website.
In order to measure the effectiveness of both campaigns, a facebook pixel has been implemented on the website to measure every clicks on “print the coupon”.
After one month of data, we noted some first results:
Engagement metrics:
Most relevant KPIs:
Globally, offer campaign generated link clicks at a lower cost than without the offer. This is a consequence of the better CTR (1,33% vs 0,73%). In addition, the engagement was better for offer campaign. People more often interacted with the ad with a higher number of reactions, comments and shares. In total the engagement rate per person was two-time higher with the offer.
The marketing campaign aimed at generating leads. As detailed in the table above, the cost per lead was almost 30% lower for offer campaign despite the higher CPM (3,81€ instead of 2,95€).
Conclusions and recommendations
Facebook offers show encouraging results. We recommend to use this format for specific discounts with limited duration. Offer’s redemption can be used either for online or offline.
However, we would recommend to keep the following elements in mind :
- If you have to redirect people to a specific URL, you must pick the option “online and offline”. Even if the offer can solely be claimed offline.
- Do not forget to deploy a Facebook pixel event to measure the results of your campaign
- Only one offer can be linked to an ad set. However, several ad descriptions and images can be tested
- The “offline only” option (bar code) is currently not available in Belgium
