Have you used Facebook’s custom audiences to get the most out of your Facebook advertising spend? Read on to find out what they are, when to use them and how effective they are.
What are Custom Audiences?
A Custom Audience is an audience that lets you show ads to people who may already interact with your business. Maybe they’ve reacted to your Facebook Page posts, purchased products on your website, downloaded your app, visited your shop or interacted with you on Instagram.
When to Use Custom Audiences?
Using custom audiences helps you to be more targeted in your advertising and get the best return on investment for your advertising spend.
It’s worth considering custom audiences when you want to target people who have already shown an interest in your business or product and you want to reach them with the product they have already shown an interest in (remarketing) or with a new or similar offering. Here’s a few examples:
1) Website Visitors: If you want to reach website visitors people who have visited a specific website page with an advert reminding them what you offer, you can use a custom audience to set up a remarketing campaign. Since these people have already shown they have an interest in your services by visiting your website, they should be more receptive to your advert. You can even target people who have spent a longer time on specific pages, making your audience even more targeted, especially useful if you have a high volume of visitors.
If you have a new product launch it would be worthwhile targeting people who have recently browsed similar product pages on your website, or interacted with your Facebook Page rather than an audience based on demographic and interests information alone.
2) Customer lists: If you have an email marketing list you could upload your customer list and target people who have bought from you in the past. This is especially useful if you don’t have an online shop from which to track purchases using the Facebook Pixel. Note though that this will only work if Facebook can match the email address in your database with a user’s Facebook email. You also need to make sure you collected the correct permissions from people when they signed up to your marketing list.
3) Lookalike Audience: You can also use your Custom Audiences to create another type of audience called a Lookalike Audience. This audience is made up of people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers.
How Effective are Custom Audiences?
Custom audiences can be a very effective type of advertising campaign and typically attract a higher conversion rate than an audience which is set up using demographics and interests only. They often run alongside, or after, a series of more general awareness raising campaigns. The awareness raising campaign might generate the website numbers or Facebook activity and the custom audience ads then use these results to target people who have interacted with your business or product.
If you haven’t yet experimented with Custom Audiences it’s worth giving this powerful tool a go. Some Custom Audiences require inserting the Facebook Pixel Code on your website, but simply linking to Facebook activity just requires set up through the Audiences section of Ad Manager.
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