Rick Kuwahara
We all know how great Facebook targeting has become over the past few years, but are you really getting everything you can from it?
With all the options available at your fingertips, there are literally thousands of ways you can target potential customers.
Here are four custom Facebook audiences you should give a try.
But first…
Before you do anything, be sure you implement your Facebook pixel. You’ll need that in order to run some of these custom audiences.
Next, go through a quick refresher on how to build Facebook custom audiences. This post is giving you ideas on audiences to try, but it’s not a How-To.
1. Clone your converted web traffic
Retargeting is one of the strengths of Facebook advertising. So why not use it to your advantage when targeting new customers.
To do this, first you need to create a custom audience from your website visitors. But instead of just targeting all visitors, you’ll want to target the visitors to one specific page – your confirmation page.
This assumes you’ve set-up a confirmation page that a visitor gets redirected to once they complete an action on your website – like filling out a form. If you haven’t, do that now.
But why would we target people who have already converted? Well, we aren’t.
Once you’ve created the custom audience to the confirmation page, create a lookalike audience to target similar people on Facebook. Even better, you can actually exclude the original retargeting audience to insure there’s no duplicates.
2. Use Google Analytics info for your Facebook Custom Audiences
This one you probably are already doing. But if not, it can be a great way to drill down on Facebook custom audiences that convert.
Google Analytics has great information on who is actually visiting your website, including interests and demographics. You can use that data to target interests in Facebook as well as segment campaigns by demographics.
For example, if you have a high amount of traffic from people who love sports and live in the west coast, then you can probably news jack sports related news to build awareness for your brand. Like the move of the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles this past year.
3. Use Life Events targeting
Ok, this one is not my idea and I lifted it from Wordstream. But Life Events is seriously underrated and can be super valuable if the available events match up with your brand.
Imagine sending an ad about wedding photography services right after someone got engaged. Or maybe even gym membership ads (hey we all want to look good for our wedding day).
4. Segment Custom Audiences based on your sales funnel
Facebook ads tend to either be all about branding or all about sales for the vast majority of businesses.
But the sophisticated marketers understand that every stage of the sales funnel or buyer’s journey needs to be addressed. The easiest way to do this is based on previous actions on your website.
Remember tip #1? Well, we’re going to reuse it but instead of focusing just on people who hit the confirmation page, we’ll target different pages along the way.
As an example, say someone clicked on a blog post you boosted and gave you their email address to download a health eating guide. You can upload all the email addresses for people who complete that step to create a custom audience and give them an ad for 1 month worth of healthy recipes for $5. If they complete that step, you send them to another confirmation page and retarget them to join your healthy eating community and services for $20/mo.
Each step someone takes helps you identify where they are in the funnel and you can nurture that relationship by targeting specific ads to them.
Wrapping it up
There’s a lot of options for you in defining great Facebook custom audiences that will drive growth for your business. Sometimes it’s too much and can be overwhelming.
But the worst thing you can do is not get started. Give a custom audience a try and keep refining it. It’s well worth the effort.
