Facebook Custom Audiences What are custom audiences? Facebook allows you to create 3 kinds of custom audience: a. People who have visited your website b. People whose data you already have (email addresses, phone nos., etc.) c. Lookalike audience Facebook will create a lookalike audience based on either of these 2 types of audience, or based on people who have liked your Page, or who have viewed your video. How does this help? Not only can you target those who visited your website, or are on your email list, but you can get very specific and serve ads to certain segments, for example, people who have visited specific pages of your website and not others, etc.) You can create very specific ads targeted to a certain group of people. eg. Reminders to buy (if they visited sales page but not the thank you page for example) Ads to grow positioning (to those who visited a specific blog page for example) Special offer to those who have already bought something similar Ask a question to get engagement Targeted message to those who added an item to an online sales cart but didn’t buy

     

As they have already come into contact with you/ heard of you, there has been trust built and so they are far more likely to respond to ads than a ‘cold’ audience would be. . Setting up custom audiences INSTALL THE FACEBOOK PIXEL ON YOUR WEB PAGES First, make sure you have the Facebook pixel installed on every web page you own so that you can create specific website custom audiences whenever you need to. Go to Ads Manager and then ‘All Tools’ then ‘Pixels’: You’ll get to this page:

Then click on ‘Actions’ and ‘View pixel code’

     

Either copy and paste the code and install it yourself (between the head tags of every website page) or email it to your web developer to add for you. (Alternatively, for WordPress sites, there are plug ins that do this for you.) One that is widely used is called “Insert Headers and Footers” https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/insert-headers-and-footers/ CREATE SPECIFIC AUDIENCES In Ads Manager, go to ‘Assets’ then ‘Audiences’, then choose ‘Create Audience’:

     

Select custom audience.

     

To create an audience from your own data (email list), select ‘Customer File’:

Choose whether you want to copy and paste (by clicking the radio button)

     

or to upload a file (csv format) : (Facebook will automatically ‘map’ the data that you upload – it’s not complex – just follow the steps. It works fine with just a list of email addresses, but if you don’t have time to strip out other fields from your data than facebook will ‘clean’ it for you!)

     

Give your audience a name and description and save it. You can also choose to integrate directly with Mailchimp (another reason for using this tool!)

     

Just log in and you will be presented with a list of all your lists – just choose the ones you want to be uploaded to Facebook:

     

To create an audience from people landing on your website (or squeeze or landing page) choose Website Traffic. You get taken to a tab where you can choose which websites/ pages you want to pull data from:

(You have added your Facebook Pixel to every website page (the same pixel on each page). Now you choose which pages to pull the data from – and you can create endless variations of your audiences to suit specific goals.)

     

(I recommend specifying the url of the page whenever it makes sense to do so – it gives less room for error!). This is how you can choose to target visitors to certain pages but not others:

     

(Note that you can view your pixel code here too.) [As you create different audiences, they will get listed in the table on the ‘audiences’ page. You can go back in at any time and view the pixel (by clicking on the box next to the audience, and then choosing ‘actions’ from the top menu.] To create an Engagement on Facebook audience: Click on the option at the bottom – be aware that this is only available for video at the moment but It looks as if the choice will be expanded soon:

     

If you click ‘video’ you will get to this screen:

Choose the time range and give a name to your audience. The choices of video engagement are as follows:

     

(Once you’ve chosen the engagement type, you then get prompted to choose which video.) To create a lookalike audience, you need a ‘seed’ audience with >100 people in it. You can then ask Facebook to find you another group of people with similar interests and demographics to target. Go back to ‘create audience’ and choose ‘lookalike audience’: Then choose the source audience from those you have created already. (Alternatively you can create a lookalike audience from people whio like your Page, or from people who have viewed a certain % of a video.) Choose the country to target and whether you want people chosen on similarity (ie. at the 1% end of the range) (recommended) or reach (a higher % and therefore bigger audience size):

     

Targeting your custom audiences with ads

     

When you have your audiences set up you can select them to show your ads to as the first option in the ‘targeting window’. You can also choose to exclude custom audiences, such as people who have bought from you already, from your ads. . When using lookalike audiences, sometimes the best results are obtained when applying an extra layer of filtering.

Get creative and start planning which audiences would work best for you – and which ads you need to create to get the best results!