Dive Brief:

• Starting in the U.S. today, Facebook is providing marketers with more detailed information about the people in the vicinity of their stores, including how many passersbys may have seen a brand’s ad on the social network in the past 28 days, for example, and other insights into foot traffic trends, “using aggregated and anonymized information,” Ad Age reported.

• To help retailers direct more of that foot traffic to its stores, Facebook is offering them new ways to customize their ads when shoppers are nearby.

• Retailers can now use a new section featured in Facebook's page insights tool to access the information on the foot traffic around individual business locations.

   

Dive Insight:

The move comes as Facebook makes a 360-degree bid for a place in the retail business, and amid a growing industry push to capture shoppers’ dollars via geo-location analytics.

The social network has added everything from shoppable ads and a dedicated shopping section as well as “buy buttons” to its site this year.

Now it’s looking to help its retail partners capture the attention — and dollars — of shoppers on the go.  

Updated once every day, that aggregated, anonymous information will not report the actual number of people that have passed by a store, but instead generate trend information over the past week, month or quarter so that businesses can identify when particular groups of people are more or less likely to be nearby, as well as what times of day or days of the week are the busiest in a neighborhood. That information will include an age and gender breakdown of passerby’s, which can be cross-referenced to see when men or women of a particular age are typically in the area, Ad Age reported.