Facebook has a lot of valuable login data of more than 2 billion users. This means that the targeting possibilities are abundant. This topic is a 2 part series wherein we will understand what is a custom audience and later explore different types of custom audiences available on Facebook.
What are Custom Audiences?
Custom audiences are the audiences who have already interacted with your brand. It could range from targeting people who interacted with your Instagram account to retargeting existing website visitors who abandoned the cart. Although custom audiences on Facebook are very powerful for mid-funnel and lower funnel activities, clubbing them with lookalikes would multifold your returns for finding new similar customers. More on that in another article.
Facebook simply puts it as “Targeting your existing audiences among people who are on Facebook”You can use your own sources from your website, email list, customer list, etc or you could also use Facebook sources i.e, Facebook page, the latest video that you posted, etc. Let’s deep-dive, into all the different types of custom audiences on Facebook.
Types of Custom Audiences
There are 12 different types of custom audiences you can create on Facebook based on the choice of your sources. In order to do that, you need to have a pixel installed into your website so that Facebook can collect user data of all the folks who visit your website.
Website Custom Audiences
Website custom audience is the audience set created comprising of a group of users who have visited your website. Facebook uses the data collected by the pixel to match with the users available on Facebook. You can target all of your website visitors or people who have visited specific pages on your website in the specified time frame. If you would like to target qualified users, then you could target them by the amount of time spent as well. Give your audiences a name so that you can identify and use them for multiple campaigns.
Customer List Custom Audiences
Do you have an email list that you collect from your customers for sending them newsletters? Or do you have a list of users who purchased your product? You can target them all using the customer list custom audiences. As you might have guessed, Facebook primarily uses email addresses to match with the Facebook profile. You could directly upload your existing list or download the template and fill in your customer data.
App Activity Custom Audiences
If you have a mobile app, you could target users on specific actions that were taken on your app. It could be just the users who have opened your app or it could be the user who has completed a specific event say bought wooden furniture from your app.
Offline Activity Custom Audiences
You need to have an offline activity event set up before you use this. Let’s say you are in the automotive sector and a user has registered for the test drive. This user ends up purchasing the car and the conversion has happened offline. This is when you need to use offline activity custom audiences to target them online and also find similar prospects using lookalikes. In addition to the usual details like name, email address, etc that would get off the usual customer list, you also need a timestamp as to when the transaction took place.
Now that we have covered custom audiences using your sources, let us have a look at the custom audience possibilities using Facebook’s sources.
Video Engaged Custom Audience
If you have posted a video or run a video campaign on Facebook, you can create a custom audience targeting users who have engaged with the video. You could also filter users based on the video view time i.e, the first 3 seconds to %completion on video. You can even select multiple videos to create a custom audience from that group of users.
Custom Audiences Using Instagram Account/Facebook Page
If your business has a Facebook page/Instagram business account, you can create custom audiences targeting those specific users. You can use these audiences as an inclusion or exclusion in your campaign targeting depending on the campaign objectives.
For example, if you are running a prospecting campaign scouting for new customers for your business, you can exclude this custom audience in the targeting option whilst setting up a campaign. However, if you are running a loyalty campaign wherein you provide 20% off to the users who have already interacted with your brand, use this custom audience for targeting in your campaign setup.
Now that you know some of the most powerful custom audiences, go set up a campaign to test if these work for you. If you are looking to run an awareness campaign, it is a good idea to explore reach and frequency campaigns.
In the next part of this 2 part series, we will explore a few more custom audiences including lead form, events, shopping, and more.
