Beyond the Facebook™ Pixel Installation – Facebook™ Custom Audiences (and how to use them)
So – you’ve installed your Facebook Tracking Pixel on your website. What next?
Facebook Custom Audiences cover quite a range of possibilities (detailed in this blog but possibly out of date as they change so frequently). The thing they have in common is that all are selected as audiences based on known behaviours.
All Facebook™ Custom Audiences are ‘warm’ traffic – they have interacted with your marketing material or your website at some point. This means they are aware of what you offer and aware of the value it presents. This means you can use Warm Traffic ad copy – but the really cool thing is you can take Custom Audiences and create Lookalikes to them. This is the process of establishing an audience whose profiles and behaviour or preferences closely resemble those of the people in your Custom Audience. While Lookalike Audiences are probably quite accurately reflecting your target audience, you must treat them as Cold Traffic with your ads & copy writing, as they do not know you and are not yet familiar with the value you have to offer.
How to Use Facebook™ Custom Audiences for an Ad Campaign.
The most common use of Custom Audience Ads is using a specific landing page or URL as your audience – people who have visited a landing page on your website, but who have not yet converted (in other words, who have not yet performed the call to action you placed on the page for them).
For this reason, your landing page MUST have a call to action leading to a ‘conversion action’. In this way you are able to identify people who are in your target audience who have NOT visited your landing page (by excluding the custom audience of visitors to your landing page in your audience), visitors to the landing page who HAVE converted and visitors to the page who have NOT yet converted. All three are at a different stage in your sales funnel and require a different communication style.
However, Custom Audiences do not stop there.
Those brand owners targeting ‘people who like my page and their friends’ are trying to target people who are engaged with their material – and often are of the mistaken belief that what they post on their page is viewed by the people who like the page. This is indeed no longer the case. A better approach may be to target people who have engaged with their brand on Facebook. This brings people who have interacted with any of your material on Facebook – regardless of whether they are connected to your page or not. From there you could exclude people who have actually visited your website (by excluding Custom Audience of all website visitors) and communicate accordingly to bring that group of people over the threshold of visiting your site. In this way, your communications can be very specific and purpose driven. You are literally passing people from one audience to the next by including and excluding based on behaviours.
Targeting based on video views
You may have seen an increasing number of videos on your Facebook feed recently. This is partly because it’s obviously much more engaging when your prospects can see you, but also because you can retarget people based on their video viewership – based on how many seconds of the video they have watched. So, if your 30 second video is inviting people to click to subscribe to a lead magnet, it becomes easier to target people who have watched 15 or more seconds of the video, but who have not yet visited your landing page (by excluding people in the Custom Audience of visitors to your landing page). Easy. Custom Audiences based on specific events such as downloading an item from a landing page takes this one step further – now you can target people who watched your video and visited your landing page but did not download your lead magnet. When you become skilled at using Custom Audiences, your cost per lead generally starts to decrease and ROI starts to increase. The secret to success is considering the entire strategy at the outset so that you can create your audiences and conversions at the beginning of the process.
Facebook™ Custom Audiences can be any of the following:
- People who have visited your website (any page or a specific page or pages, on a minimum amount of time on site or a repeat visitation).
- People who have a higher Lifetime Value to your business.
- People who have opted into your list
- People who have engaged with your material on Facebook™.
- People who have engaged specifically with your video material on Facebook™.
- People who have engaged with your Event(s) on Facebook.
- People who have engaged with you on Instagram.
- People who have opened or completed a lead form in a lead campaign.
Importantly, lookalike audiences can also be created based on any of the above. So, targeting your customers based on their behaviours as part of a campaign that sends people to a website with an end goal in mind, where several steps or clicks are required can be easily achieved. Conversions at every stage of the process to measure success and optimise blocks or ineffective conversion can be achieved.