175: A New Tool to Learn More About Your Offline Bidders

Facebook recently launched a new tool called Offline Events that auctioneers can use to gain insight on their offline bidders.

How it works

When you create an ad on Facebook through Business Manager, you now have the option to tie the ad to a specific offline event (an auction in our case). After the auction, you can upload a list of auction attendees to Facebook’s database; and it will match as many of its users as possible and tell you how many of the attendees saw one of your Facebook ads.

You can categorize the list as Purchase (buyers), Lead (bidders), and Other (attendees). In fact, Facebook requires you to pick one of those fields per list. For most auctioneers, it will be easiest to just upload all registered bidders; but it’s good to know you can get further analytics, if you want them.

Facebook will not give you the names or further information about the Facebook users it matches. It only aggregates the data for comparison. Also, it will match only as many as it can with the data you collect. The match rate will vary depending on how much contact information you gather.

Why it’s useful

While it might not be able to match every registered bidder whose information you collect, the good news is that it will never over-report. If someone saw advertising in another medium as well as on Facebook, this information can supplement current auction polling with real data. This tool is especially useful for those who don’t have proprietary online bidding platforms for which the Facebook Pixel can do all of this (after initial setup).

While I’ve not yet got to play around with this tool, its potential is exciting—especially for auctioneers who issue post-auction reports to sellers. The more data point you can use to validate your marketing strategy, the better.

Who it benefits most

This will especially benefit those who sell the same asset categories over and over again and/or those who sell multiple asset categories but in the same geographic area all the time. It will be easier to find trends in this data, if you have bigger bidder pools (typically personal property and commercial equipment) or many auctions per year.

If you’d like to experiment with this tool, you can get a free, quick tutorial here.

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Stock image purchased from iStockPhoto.com