Facebook Custom Audiences 101
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Facebook Custom Audiences is among the greatest solutions on Facebook for targeting a specific audience with advertisements. You may retarget customers who have previously interacted with your business, such as those who have made purchases from your store or visited your website, using Custom Audiences.

Your ads will perform better the more you understand the target market. When you market to a Custom Audience, you can target your messaging with laser-like accuracy and know precisely who is seeing your advertising. Your conversion rates will rise as a result, and your return on investment will improve.

How to use Facebook Custom Audiences

You may choose from a wide range of factors using Facebook Custom Audiences to be quite particular about your target audience. As a consequence, you can produce more effective advertisements.

Here are my top six recommendations for using Facebook Custom Audiences.

1. Grow your Facebook audience

You may increase your Facebook audience by using Custom Audiences. Create a Custom Audience of individuals who have recently visited your website or subscribed to your email list, and then use that Custom Audience to run advertisements urging those individuals to follow your business on Facebook.

2. Upsell existing customers

A list of people who have already made a purchase from you, or your existing customers, may be made using Custom Audiences. This is a terrific approach to increase the lifetime value of each client if you have more than one product to sell.

Offer similar products or accessories if you have them in a campaign that is aimed at recent buyers. Utilizing a unique, time-limited campaign will nudge people into immediate action.

Facebook Upsell Ad Example

3. Target people who abandoned their carts

There are a variety of causes for cart abandonment. They frequently simply got busy and didn't have time to finish their transaction. However, there is a significant possibility they intend to purchase if they put something in their basket.

Send them a tailored Facebook ad right away to follow up with them before they forget or, worse, decide to buy it somewhere else.

4. Sell to active subscribers

The most challenging customers to sell to are those who have never heard of your business before. The majority of us don't simply go to a website for the first time and make a purchase. First, we need to come to know and trust the business. Because of this, selling to strangers on Facebook is challenging.

Selling to active subscribers—those who have not only joined your list but also opened your emails—will increase your conversion rate. They have heard of your company, and they like it enough to subscribe to your mailing list and read your content regularly.

5. Get feedback from customers

The value of feedback to business owners is enormous. Making ensuring your consumers are satisfied will be made easier with regular feedback. Even better, customer feedback is a fantastic source for product and marketing ideas.

After a consumer makes a purchase, use Facebook to contact them again and request their participation in a survey. Run a contest to provide incentives if you want to increase the likelihood that people will finish your surveys.

6. Build your email list

Any online business would benefit from creating an email list. It's the most trustworthy method of staying in touch with both current and future clients. Additionally, while list building often takes place on your website, Facebook can also be used.

You may increase the number of email subscribers you have by marketing to website visitors. Visitors to your website are more likely to join up than total strangers since they already know you.

How to create a Facebook Custom Audience

On Facebook, there are several ways to build Custom Audiences. One can:

  • Use offline activity data.
  • Upload a customer contact list.
  • Use website visitor or app activity data.
  • Build a Custom Audience with Shopify’s Facebook Marketing app.
  • Data from how users interacted with you on Facebook or Instagram, such as viewing a video you uploaded or visiting your business's profile, can be used.

In this piece, we'll go over the three most typical methods for creating a Facebook Custom Audience: importing a contact list, leveraging website visitor data, and using Shopify's Facebook Marketing app.

1. Upload a list of customer contact information

If you have an email list of customers/mailing list subscribers, you may upload the entire list or select pieces of it to Facebook to establish a Custom Audience. You may target your Facebook ads to customers/subscribers that use the same email address with both your brand and Facebook.

However, keep in mind that the persons on your list must have opted in to receive your messages. You cannot buy an email address list or submit random email addresses or phone numbers.

Click the shortcuts symbol in the top-left corner of the screen, then pick Audiences to build a Custom Audience on Facebook using a contact list.

Create Facebook ads

Click the Create Audience dropdown, then select Custom Audience.

lookalike audience facebook

Next, select Customer list.

Create Facebook Custom Audience From Customer List

You have a few ways for rebuilding your list as a Custom Audience on Facebook:

  • Copy and paste the data. You may manually copy and paste the data from your list into Facebook if you simply have a tiny list.
  • Upload a CSV file. If you have a long list, you should submit a CSV file. You may get a CSV of your contacts from your email marketing provider or save any spreadsheet containing customer/subscriber contact information as a CSV. Make sure that all of the email addresses (or phone numbers) are included in a single column with no additional information before uploading.
  • Connect Shopify to Facebook. If you host your email list with a Shopify-supported email service, you may link Facebook to your list directly rather than uploading or copying and pasting.

Following the addition of your list, Facebook will match the consumer data with Facebook users.

2. Target people who’ve visited your website

Another option is to build a Custom Audience comprised of people who have recently visited your website (as long as they were logged into Facebook when they arrived).

The first step in building a Custom Audience made of website visitors is to create a Custom Audience pixel, which is a fancy way of saying a snippet of code you place on your site that communicates with Facebook and records your visitors.

You may make a Custom Audience pixel by following the same steps as you would make a Custom Audience. Begin by choosing Audiences from the shortcuts menu in the top-left area of the screen.

Create Facebook Custom Audience Step -1-1

Click the Create Audience dropdown, then select Custom Audience.

Create Facebook Custom Audience Step 2-2

Next, select Website.

Create Facebook Custom Audience From Website Visits

Give your pixel a name, enter your website’s URL, and click Continue.

Creating a Facebook Pixel

Following that, you'll want to choose the requirements for generating your Custom Audience. You may select to target all website visitors, certain pages of your site, or those who spent a certain amount of time on it. You may also set a time limit of up to 180 days.

Creating a Website Custom Audience on Facebook

When you're satisfied, give your audience a meaningful name and then click Create Audience.

Creating a Website Custom Audience on Facebook Step 2

3. Use Shopify’s Facebook Marketing app

Shopify’s Facebook Marketing app allows you to build, manage, and track Facebook marketing campaigns without leaving the platform. It also configures your Facebook tracking pixel for you, allowing you to build advertising that targets visitors to your site.

Follow the steps in the video below to create Facebook audience-building ads with Shopify's Facebook Marketing app.

The software may also be used to make dynamic retargeting ads. These show up as customized Facebook carousel advertisements that feature products your site visitors have viewed or added to their shopping carts.

Important notes about Facebook Custom Audiences

There are a few things you'll want to keep in mind while building Custom Audiences on Facebook to prevent mistakes and ensure that you're targeting the proper individuals with your ads.

  • To establish Custom Audiences, you must have a Facebook Business Manager account. If you don't already have a Business Manager account, Facebook will urge you to establish one when you try to create a Custom Audience, or you may begin by creating a new Business Manager account.
  • To deliver advertising to your Custom Audience, you must have at least 20 persons in your Custom Audience. If your website isn't getting much traffic yet, or if your email list is tiny, you may consider running advertising to drive traffic to your site or promote email signups before creating Custom Audiences.
  • It is possible that you will not be able to include all of your clients, visitors, or subscribers in a Custom Audience. Not everyone who visits your website will be a Facebook user. People on your email list may, similarly, use a separate email address for their Facebook accounts. So, if your Custom Audience is lower than planned, it's not always due to an issue.
  • Your email Custom Audiences need to be updated frequently. If you manually added a list of contacts to Facebook to create your Custom Audience, be sure to update it regularly by copying and pasting new subscribers into your Custom Audience list, replacing your Custom Audience with a new CSV file containing all of your contacts, or uploading a new CSV file with only new contacts.

Shopify users may also use applications from the Shopify App Store to automate the process of updating their client audiences, such as Audience Push to Facebook or Facebook Custom Audiences.

More advanced ways to use Facebook Custom Audiences

Once you've mastered the fundamentals of Facebook advertising using Custom Audiences, you may want to take things a step further by designing even more targeted advertisements using some of Facebook's more sophisticated choices.

Facebook Dynamic Product Ads

The majority of Custom Audiences need manual setup. Particularly if you want to target your visitors based on the products they looked at This rapidly becomes unworkable for websites with a large number of pages.

A more automatic option is provided by Facebook dynamic product advertisements. Visitors to a website view ads depending on the products they looked at and how near they were to checking out. All you have to do is specify the settings and build the ad template. After then, it operates on its own.

The Shopify Facebook Marketing app makes it simple for customers to create dynamic product advertisements. Your items are immediately made accessible to the Facebook Marketing app once it is set up. These items are subsequently linked to a Facebook product catalog that may be used to create dynamic retargeting advertising.

Exclusions

Having the option to exclude people is one of the features that give Custom Audiences its strength. For instance, take sure to leave out current subscribers if you advertise to add website visitors to your email list.

Similar to this, if you're selling to website visitors on Facebook and you only have one thing to sell, chances are they'll only make one purchase from you. Exclude anyone who has previously purchased to save money.

The most common error I observe business owners making with Facebook Custom Audiences is failing to employ exclusions. It costs money to keep advertising to folks who have previously converted. Consider how you might further divide your audience by excluding some individuals at all times.

Lookalike Audiences

After you've built a Custom Audience, you can use lookalike audiences to enlarge it to include users who haven't viewed your website or subscribed to your email newsletter but who have some of the same characteristics.

This is a fantastic approach to advertising your products to those who may be interested in what you have to offer but aren't yet familiar with your business or products.

You need at least 100 individuals from a single nation in one of your current Custom Audiences to establish a lookalike audience.

Value-based Lookalike Audiences

Create value-based lookalike audiences to assign an indicator indicating the highest-value clients on your list if you want to be extremely specific with your ad targeting.

This new piece of information enables Facebook to further hone its targeting so that it only broadens its audience to those who are most likely to have a high customer lifetime value.

Pixel Events

If you use the Meta pixel on your website, you can also set up Pixel Events that add users to your Custom Audience when they do things like:

  • Adding a product to the shopping cart
  • Adding a product to a wishlist
  • Making a purchase
  • Performing a site search
  • Subscribing to your newsletter
  • Viewing a specific piece of content

This allows you to automate the process of creating your various Custom Audiences and guarantees that you're only targeting the individuals you want to see certain ads—for example, an abandoned cart ad.

Start advertising

When your first Custom Audience is complete, it's time to begin advertising! Every time you build a new campaign, you'll have the option of targeting it with one of your Custom Audiences. At any moment, you may also establish a new Custom Audience. A bespoke audience based on your present consumers is an excellent method to boost your advertising marketing efforts.

Have you already dabbled with Facebook Custom Audiences? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Facebook Custom Audience FAQ

What is a Facebook Custom Audience?

Users of Facebook may import email addresses using the Facebook Custom Audience function, which can then be used for retargeting marketing campaigns on several other social media sites.

What is the minimum size for a Custom Audience on Facebook?

Currently, using Facebook Custom Audience requires a minimum of 100 emails.

What is the difference between Custom audiences and lookalike audiences?

A lookalike crowd and a Facebook Custom Audience vary primarily in that a lookalike audience allows you to target people who are similar to your current audience and customers.

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