Experiencing low match rates on Facebook? Learn how marketers can boost their match rates and find more of their ideal customers or prospects with a custom audience.
Facebook Custom Audiences
As most digital marketers know, you can build custom audiences within Facebook’s advertising platform. Custom audiences are created from lists of your existing contacts/prospects or targeted lists purchased for marketing functions. Custom audiences are extremely valuable for running remarketing campaigns, segmenting current prospects and reaching them with different messaging or creative based on where they are in the funnel, or executing account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns.
Within Facebook’s ad manager, it’s possible to target ads on Facebook, Instagram, and the Audience Network to your custom audiences. But how does it work and how do you actually reach them?
Facebook hashes your data locally before matching it against their user base. This means only the data attributes you’ve provided Facebook can be used to find Facebook users. Facebook uses, what they call, “Advanced Matching” to match users. Which means your files can contain the following data attributes for Facebook to match users with:
- Email Address
- Phone Number (include country code)
- First Name
- Last Name
- City
- State/Province
- Country
- Date of Birth
- Gender
- Mobile Advertiser ID
- Facebook App User ID
Think about this. What data do you have on your customers or prospects? Most B2B companies have a name, business email address, and phone number (sometimes more, sometimes less). If your customers created their Facebook profiles using a personal, non-professional, email address, the chance of being able to match them on Facebook in a custom audience is quite low.
So then, how do we, as marketers, combat this issue?
Data Appending
Data appending is accomplished by adding additional data attributes associated with a specific record in a file. Most data append services do this in bulk, appending an entire file of data.
So, how does this relate to achieving better match rates with Facebook ads? By appending additional data points to your list of customers, you’re improving the chance that Facebook can match them to a Facebook user. The more data attributes you can add, the better your match rates will be.
We can’t rely on our prospects providing us the same exact email address that they use to log in to Facebook when they fill out our online forms, give us contact information at an event, or speak to our sales team. This is why data appending is so valuable for B2B marketers. It’s most common for a B2B prospect to provide a business email address, which then makes it extremely difficult for Facebook to match them since most individuals do not use their business email address to log in to their social media accounts.
How to Append B2B Data
Now that we know appending B2B data with non-professional data attributes can greatly improve our Facebook custom audience match rates, how do marketers accomplish this? Enter: Versium REACH. This platform is an easy-to-use dashboard for creating online audiences to upload as custom audiences within the Facebook ad manager. Simply upload a list of customers from your CRM, prospects you’ve gathered through lead gen, or a purchased list and Versium REACH will append non-professional data to your list. Next, download the new list (with the additional data) and upload the output into the Facebook advertising platform as a custom audience. Voila! Enjoy an increased match rate for reaching your ideal targets!
Check out our stats on match rates in advertising platforms before and after using Versium REACH.
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