Your first campaign allowed you to interact with your persona. You have just created your first audience on Facebook: one that most closely matches the profile you created at the beginning of this course.
Still, this initial audience can be extremely large, even if you select your users by interests or behaviors. A best practice is to target people who have already interacted with your brand, either from a previous campaign or offline. This way, you will create a very specific and highly qualified audience. These are custom audiences. In marketing, this is called remarketing or retargeting.
You can then create additional audiences that expand the custom audiences by searching Facebook for people who are most like the selected audiences. These are the lookalike audiences that we will discuss at the end of this chapter.
Create Your Custom Audiences
To reach people who have already shown interest in your product and/or company, you have two options:
Use your data sources (website, app, customer list, etc.).
Use Facebook data sources (engagement, form, page followers, etc.).
Let's review the main sources available:
Customer list: Upload a CSV containing email addresses or phone numbers, and Facebook will find your users on the network.
Website traffic: Target people who have visited your site using the tracking Pixel.
App activity: People who have been active on one of your apps.
Facebook Page: People who have interacted with or liked your Facebook Page.
Instagram account: People who have visited or interacted with your Instagram account.
Lead form: People who have opened or filled out a form from your ads.
Video: People who have watched one of your videos (partly or fully) on Facebook or Instagram.
To create a new custom audience, go to your audience list by clicking on Audiences in the main menu.
This page displays any audiences you have saved as well as your custom ones. For the moment, you don't have any, but soon you'll have plenty!
Click on Create Audience and then Custom Audience. Facebook then asks you what type of audience you want to create.
Manage the Customer List
If you select Customer List, you can upload a CSV or TXT file containing information that will allow Facebook to find these people on the network, either by email address, phone number, Facebook ID, or mobile advertising ID.
Add your file, give your audience a memorable name (“Newsletter subscribers,” for example), and click on Create Audience.
Facebook will find between 60 and 80% of the people on your list. Pretty good!
Target From Your Website
Targeting the people who belong to your customer list is great, but what if you don't have enough prospects? Or if you want to create an ad for a wider target?
The website source allows you to target people who have already visited your site. Thanks to its tracking tool (the Pixel), Facebook knows when a user has visited your site and the page they visited. This allows you to interact with that person again by displaying an ad.
Select the option that suits you and the time period you want to take into account (the number of days that people should remain in your audience after visiting your website). The maximum is 180 days.
Target by App Activity
This option allows you to target your users based on actions they have (or have not) performed.
If you have an app (mobile or Facebook), it is essential to be able to interact with the user based on their behavior by offering them relevant ads. For example, let's say a user doesn't log in for four months. Show them a brand new feature that will encourage them to open your app! And that other user who put items in their shopping cart without actually making a purchase? Offer them a coupon for the products they chose!
Target by Video Audience
This type of custom audience is based on video engagement. It will target people who interacted with a video you posted.
When you've created your Custom Audience, launch a new campaign! It will help you to refine your initial audience.
Launch a Campaign for a Custom Audience
Selecting a Custom Audience is so easy! First, create a new campaign. Then, select the Custom Audience you want from the Custom Audience field when setting up your audience
This first field is by design: Custom audiences are a real asset in your web marketing strategy because they have a conversion rate that is, in general, much higher than interest-based audiences.
Create Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike Audiences are great! They enable you to find people similar to one of your other audiences. That way, you reach a wider target audience based on an already highly qualified one.
For example, you can create a Lookalike Audience to target people similar to your newsletter subscribers. You start by creating a Custom Audience of about 1,000 people by including your subscribers’ email addresses. Then you create a Lookalike Audience. Facebook will determine the commonalities between your subscribers (interests, behavior on the platform, friends, etc.) and target people throughout Facebook who share the same characteristics. You can easily reach an audience of 10,000 highly qualified people. Isn't that amazing?
Creating a Lookalike Audience is very simple.
When your campaign is complete, go back to the list of audiences and click on Create Audience, then Lookalike Audience. Then click Advanced Options.
Source (required): Facebook asks you to indicate the source it should use to build the Lookalike Audience. You can select a custom page or audience.
Country (required): This is the country your Lookalike Audience should reside in.
Number of Lookalike Audiences: Facebook can segment the Custom Audience it will create based on the degree of similarity. The number of audiences is the number of segments that will be generated.
The slider below shows you the estimated number of people in each segment, representing 1% of a country’s total audience.
The first segment (Audience 1) is your core target: the people who share the most similarities with the source you have selected.
The second segment (Audience 2) broadens the target. These people share fewer characteristics than your core target audience but may still be interested in your ad.
The third segment (Audience 3) includes, in my example, all other people from the selected country. Of course, there is no point in broadcasting your ad to 80% of, for example, Australian internet users on Facebook. So you need to refine the last segment. It's up to you to determine how much of each you want to assign and how similar it should be to the original source.
Why should I segment my audience?
Segmenting this way allows you to test your ad with three different audiences. This means that you can create one campaign to target your core audience, a second one for a slightly less similar audience, and a third one for a more distant one. This will enable you to analyze the behavior of each target and adapt your campaigns and ads accordingly.
Let's summarize with a diagram!
Let's Recap!
We have seen in this chapter how to refine your target so that your campaigns reach the highest quality audience. Facebook has two solutions for this:
Target people who already know your brand or company with Custom Audiences.
Target people who are similar to your core audience with Lookalike Audiences.
However, a well-defined audience will be of no use to you if your ads don’t appeal to the people you’re targeting. How can you improve your campaigns and test which settings work best? We'll look at that together in the next chapter!
