Your Guide to Facebook Custom Audiences

Paid advertising can be a tricky business, but with careful strategizing and tracking on the go, it can surely be a reliable source of leads and sales. When done wrong, however, it can be an expensive lesson.

The more you know about your audience, the better your ads will perform. Perhaps this is why many firms prefer to advertise on Facebook: the platform offers a host of options for audience targeting.

One brilliant tool is Facebook Custom Audiences. With Custom Audiences, firms can retarget users who may have interacted with the business already, such as customers and website visitors.

Marketing to a custom audience means a firm can see exactly who is viewing their ads, allowing their messaging to be honed specifically for this grouping. Doing so allows a business to jumpstart its conversion rate and ensure a much better return on investment.

There are three types of Custom Audiences to keep in mind. For each different type, you can choose to target smaller segments of your audience; the more specific you go, the more effective your campaign is sure to be.

Customer List

Use customer data, like email addresses and phone numbers, to build your Custom Audience. You can upload an entire list to the platform, or stick to smaller sections. As long as your customers use the same contact information with Facebook, you’ll be able to target them. Remember to get permission first – you can’t upload any old email address or phone number.

Website Traffic

Advertise to anyone who has visited your website in the past 180 days, as long they were also logged onto Facebook. It’s up to you to choose the timeframe, and decide exactly which website visitors you’d like to target based on the pages they visited. By way of example, you can specifically target people that viewed product pages in the last 30 days.

App Activity

If you have a mobile app, create a Custom Audience based around app activity. Target anyone who has engaged with your app in the last 180 days, as long they were also logged into Facebook.

There are countless ways to use Facebook Custom Audiences, and you can select from a variety of parameters to specify who you want to target. Here the main three targets firms rely on:

Grow Your Facebook Audience

Build your Facebook audience by retargeting subscribers after they have left your website. Your goal here is to make a sale, or collect leads that you can sell to later.

Upsell Existing Customers

You can also use Custom Audiences to create a list of people who have already purchased products from you. If you have more than one product in your offering, this is a great way to improve your customer’s lifetime value. According to some statistics, the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5 to 20%; the probability of selling to an existing customer is more than 60%.

Target People Who Left Their Cart

Don’t forget users who came close to becoming a customer! This targeting option allows you to follow up with users who have almost completed their purchase journey but didn’t. Maybe they were busy, maybe they were undecided. Either way, it’s a good idea to remind them of your existence.