Meta no longer offers a store traffic objective. Its 11 campaign objectives became six, store traffic was not among them, and the help page that once explained how store visits were calculated now redirects to a page about store location features. A local business can still run ads that show its address and a Get directions button. It cannot get a store visits number from Meta, and most never could.
In short
- Meta consolidated its objectives into six: app promotion, awareness, engagement, leads, sales and traffic (Adweek).
- Existing store traffic campaigns ran "until mid-2024, tentatively", after which businesses were told to use the awareness or sales objective with store location features (Meta Business Help).
- "Store Pages are only available to managed Facebook clients", the same help centre says (Meta Business Help).
- What a café can measure in Meta today is reach, clicks and on-platform actions. The visit has to be counted at the door.
What happened to the store traffic objective?
Meta's store traffic objective "was designed to help create ads that can help increase store visitors and boost in-store sales at, for example shops, restaurants, dealerships, gyms or salons". That is Meta's own description, written in the past tense on the help page that now answers the question "How do I create an ad campaign for store traffic now?"
The answer: "The original 11 ad objectives in Meta Ads Manager have been simplified into six to better align with your business goals. You can now create campaigns that help increase store visitors and in-store sales using the awareness objective, sales objective and store location features." Active store traffic campaigns were allowed to continue "until mid-2024, tentatively", and advertisers were invited to duplicate them under a simplified objective.
Adweek's report on the change listed the six survivors: application promotion, awareness, engagement, leads, sales and traffic. Traffic, in Meta's vocabulary, means website traffic.
What do store location features do?
They put local details into the ad. Meta's page lists the options: show people the location of the nearest store, share phone numbers or opening hours, use a Get directions or Call now call to action, and, for businesses with a store-based catalogue, show items available nearby at local prices. The feature "is only available when you select the awareness or sales objective".
Two lines on that page matter for a small business. "Store Pages are only available to managed Facebook clients", which means the store structure the features depend on is not self-serve. And since June 2024 dynamic creative may not be available for ad sets under the sales or app promotion objectives, with the flexible ad format suggested instead.
Where did the store visits number go?
Meta used to publish a help article titled "How store visits are calculated". On October 6, 2026 that address redirects to the store location features page, which does not mention store visits at all. Whatever Meta reports to managed clients with store pages, there is no longer public documentation of a store visits metric for the rest of its advertisers.
This is consistent with the signal problem every platform faces. Visit estimates depend on two permissions: location sharing, which a user grants app by app and which no benchmark measures platform-wide, and the cross-app identifier that links the ad view to the later visit, which since iOS 14 needs the user's consent under Apple's App Tracking Transparency and which about 35% grant. An estimate built on a partial, self-selected sample of phones and scaled up is defensible for a chain and meaningless for one store. The timeline of lost signal covers the whole sequence.
What can a local business still measure in Meta?
Reach and frequency. Clicks on the ad, including the Get directions and Call now buttons, which Meta reports as on-platform actions. Messages started. Website visits, if the ad sends people to a page. All of that is upstream of the door. The question a break-even restaurant asks, "how many came in and what did each cost?", is not answered inside Ads Manager, and for 44% of Canadian restaurants operating at a loss or breaking even, per Restaurants Canada, it is the only question.
What to do instead
Build the count on your side. Give each source its own code or link, count visits at the counter, and compare channels on cost per visit. The seven methods are compared in one place, and the foot traffic guide explains why Meta's reporting was never built around a small shop's door. For a creator campaign specifically, this guide shows how to know which creator brought each customer.
On Onlure, local businesses book local creators for a campaign and see the walk-ins each creator sends. The brands page explains how a campaign is set up.
Frequently asked questions
Can I still run store traffic ads on Facebook?
Not under a store traffic objective. Meta's help page says to use the awareness or sales objective with store location features, which add an address, hours and a Get directions button to the ad. Existing store traffic campaigns were run down by mid-2024.
Does Meta report store visits for small businesses?
There is no public store visits metric for self-serve advertisers. Meta's help centre says store pages are only available to managed clients, and the article that explained how store visits were calculated now redirects to the store location features page.
What replaced the store traffic objective?
Six outcome-based objectives: app promotion, awareness, engagement, leads, sales and traffic. For foot traffic, Meta points to awareness or sales campaigns using store location features and radius targeting.
