Making the most of your Facebook campaigns.

How to create Facebook Ad Custom Audiences?

Facebook has become a catalogue of people, analysed in almost every way imaginable!
When launching a Facebook advertising campaign, it is now possible to maximise its value by tapping into very specific markets and groups of people. This is thanks to the various audiences Facebook allows you to tailor and engage with, which makes getting your message in front of the right people more intuitive than ever.

How can you Create a Facebook Custom Audience for your specific target audience?

First, go to the ”Audience” section of your ad account and select “Audiences".

Popup window will open with the types of audience you'll be able to create:

So, what are these different audiences?

1. Standard Custom Audience - Customer List

Rudimental but reliable. Building a Standard Customer Audience requires the manual input of your existing customers’ details (email addresses or phone numbers) so that Facebook can digest this information and seed your advertising out to their specific news feeds.

If that seems too time-consuming (and it is very time consuming), it’s possible to use custom audiences sync tools to speed up proceedings. These link with any CRM tools you may already use, farm the data stored and build the necessary customer list for the custom audience software to operate from.

2. Website Custom Audiences

Thanks to the invention of the Facebook Pixel, you can now have your website do the hard work for you.

Facebook Pixel works by inputting a tracking code on your website. This then logs customer interaction with your site. Facebook will then send out advertising to these already-interested parties.

It’s not going to gain you a huge amount of new costumer as it works solely with people who are already interacting with you online, but it’s a very effective way of consolidating these leads.

3. App Activity Custom Audiences 

If your business uses an app, you can implement this approach to track the actions of the app’s users. As a result, you can build various audience lists based on behaviour on and interaction with your app; browsers, purchasers, long-term and short-term engagers, it’s up to you.

With the increasing engagement on mobiles far outstripping that of desktop, if your business uses an app, this is not a system to be ignored.

4. Engagement Custom Audiences

This system looks for people who engage with certain advert types on your page.

Say you have an advert or piece of content marketing that, for whatever reason, is getting the job done, attracting the right people, getting shared around more than you had expected. You’re able to create an audience based on the people engaging with this successful content, allowing you to build on the momentum and interest.

You’ve got a window of 365 days to work with, but short term works better because timing is key. The system is designed to get the best results when it is tapping into current tastes and appreciation of what’s appealing in the here and now, not in six month’s time when interest may have ebbed somewhat.

5. Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences work on the understanding that you’ve already built your custom audience base, through one of the methods listed above.

This means you’ve got a targeted type of customer you want to reach out to, and you probably know what audience yields the best results for your business.

Facebook looks at these audiences and groups of customers and then finds people with similar profiles and behaviours from the nether and links your advertising to them too.

What’s more?

there are methods that can be used in order to increase your return and revenue when advertising to lookalike audiences. These methods are what’s known as Value Targeting.

Value Targeting: The basics

Value targeting takes these swathes of audiences and looks through the numbers to the individuals and their behaviours.

Specifically, you’re able to look at the value contributed to your business by individuals. Once the top spenders are assessed the system will then be able to find Facebook profiles that are similar in behaviour to your existing high-spending customers and seed advertising to them. 

Value Targeting: The benefits

It’s not just whether the customer will spend, you can also examine the expected spend of your existing customers on your site over a seven day period, before ring-fencing the highest contributors and casting the net wider to find and attract similar profiles.

This is where the ‘value’ truly comes into its own. You won’t be wasting advertising on people unlikely to buy, people who may be uninterested or people who buy infrequently. You’ll be able to create a campaign that targets only those you can expect to spend at the highest end.

The key element here is revenue, not the number of transactions. The model works because it focuses on fewer, larger transactions, and a greater sum total rather than a higher number of individual purchases.

Putting it all together.

Marrying Lookalike audiences with Value Targeting is a truly beneficial way to make the most of the tools Facebook has given you to reach not necessarily the widest audience, but certainly the most suitable and most prolific audience.  It’s even designed to save you money, by building bespoke packages that cater to these carefully selected customers and user groups, rather than adopting a more scattergun approach.