Facebook Custom Audiences are one of Facebook’s most valuable assets to advertisers, just behind their pixel, which I detailed on this blog post. In this blog post I’m going to break down the capabilities of Facebook Custom Audiences and multiple use cases which I would recommend anyone reading this article to do.
What are Facebook Custom Audiences?
Facebook as an advertising platform performs very well, one of the reason why it performs so well is it’s an open source platform where advertisers can customize who they’re advertising against. Through Facebook Custom Audiences advertisers can go beyond standard audience targeting such as interests, demographic data, etc. and can hone in on a very targeted group(s) of users. For example, through Facebook custom audiences you can target by the below tactics.
Website Traffic
Through this tactic you can target users based on their site visitation. For example, if you’re trying to garner leads, and someone visited your site but didn’t take action, you can have an ad targeted specifically to these users. This is leveraging the Facebook pixel. Not only can you target users who have previously visited your site, but you can create multiple rules, for example, only reach users who have:
- Visited specific pages
- Spent X amount of time on site
- Added an item to their cart
- Purchased, etc.
This is extremely powerful, when you think of the unique messages you can have, based on each audience segment and their engagement with your site.
Customer File
Through Customer File targeting, you can target users based on sources other than site visitation data. For example, if you have a list of email leads you want to target, you can upload these leads directly into Facebook. Once the leads are uploaded, Facebook will match the list of emails uploaded, to their massive database of users. As long as Facebook can match your emails to their logged in users, you can target these individuals.
Facebook Page
Facebook allows you to advertise individuals based on their engagement with your Facebook page. For example, you can target based on the following:
- Users who have visited your Facebook page
- Users who have engaged with a past post or ad
- Users who have messenger your page
- Users who have saved your page or post
What this means is you can target anyone who has interacted with your Facebook page, and have customized messaging based on their interactions.
Facebook Custom Audiences – Use Cases
Now I’m going to break down several use cases on how you can leverage the above audience targeting to drive more customers for your business.
Website Traffic Use Case
Suppose you own a retail ecommerce store, and you noticed that you get a good amount of users who are adding times to their cart, but only a fraction of them are purchasing. This is very common. Around 95% of site visitors won’t take action, it’s not because their not interested, rather they’re just not ready to make a decision and take action at that point. Thanks to Facebook Custom Audiences, you can create an audience list to target users who have added an item to their cart, but didn’t purchase. Once you created this audience, I would recommend to have a very enticing offer to close the sale. For example, you may want to offer 25% off, if they purchased that day or week, just to win their business, since they’ve already left your site.
Customer File Use Case
Suppose you have an auto repair shop , and you have an email database of past customers that haven’t been to your shop of late. Whether it be for an oil change, maintenance, or large car repair work, they haven’t been in. For this case, you may want to remind them of your business and present an offer to win their business and get them in the door. In this case, I would recommend to leverage Facebook’s Customer File audience targeting. In this instance the auto repair shop could upload an email list of past clients they’ve worked with into Facebook ad manager. From there, they can target this group of users and customize their messaging. In this case, I would suggest to offer a promotion that doesn’t require a large repair to get in the shop, it could be 10% off their next oil change, or free tire rotation, etc. This can be a very powerful play, which a lot of advertisers (especially small businesses), arn’t taking advantage of.
Facebook Page Use Case
Suppose you own a free online publication and have a large following on your Facebook page. Reason is a lot of users are reading your publication and expressed interest in your page at some point. However, you now offer premium content, that you require to pay for view, as the articles are much more in-depth and ad-free. For this media publication, I would recommend to target users who have engaged with their Facebook page, and offer an ad that specifically calls out their premium content. The ad could be very specific to their page engagement, such as “Love our content? Get more through our premium offering, get more content, ad free for only $5/month”.
Facebook Custom Audiences Summary
In summary, Facebook Custom Audiences is highly effective form of advertising, which I recommend all advertisers to take advantage of. Whatever industry that you’re in, there are very effective use cases for Facebook Custom Audiences. The above examples are just a few instances on how you can leverage Custom Audiences, but there are other methods, including:
- Interacted with your app
- Watched a video on Facebook or Instagram
- Interacted with one of your Facebook events
- Users who have interacted with your app
- Users who have watched one of your videos on Facebook or Instagram
If you want to read more on Facebook Custom Audiences, read up on Facebook’s Custom Audiences help center.
Additional Facebook Resources
Below are several blog posts that might be helpful that I wrote on Facebook Ads.
Facebook Blog Posts
- Setup Facebook Look-a-like Audiences
- The Facebook Pixel
- Top Facebook Advertising Strategies
- Answers to Common Facebook Questions
- Facebook Advertising Support
Facebook Ad Management
Facebook Ad Courses
