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 anonymously matched Facebook usage and EE data over the course of two weeks, to measure the effect of a geotargeted News Feed campaign on store visits among more than 172,000 people that were served adverts, and an equally-sized control group.

The campaign ran in Cardiff between December 2013 and January 2014, serving 1.4m impressions overall. Based on the studied sample, the strongest uplift came from 22-25 year olds, who were 31 per cent more likely to visit the store as a result of seeing the ads. These additional visitors delivered an estimated ROI of 6:1 against Ikeas media spend with Facebook.

“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.”