Facebook to stalk shoppers

Facebook will now follow its users around while they're out shopping so it can tell companies if anyone cares about their ads.

The social network said that it will let advertisers know how many people visited a store after seeing an ad by tracking folks via their phones' locations:

Historically, it has been difficult to quickly and effectively measure the impact of advertising on store visits and in-store sales. With the launch of store visits — a new metric in Ads Reporting — advertisers can now better understand their store traffic after running local awareness ads, complementing current ads reporting to provide a more complete picture.

Advertisers can use store visits reporting to:

• See how many people come to your store after seeing a Facebook campaign.
• Optimize ad creative, delivery and targeting based on store visits.
• Analyze results across stores and regions to plan and optimize future campaigns.

Store visits is an estimated metric based on information from people with location services enabled on their phone. The metric will be rolling out to advertisers globally over the coming months.

When's the next ship leaving for Mars? ®