Custom Facebook Audiences Is a Powerful Feature for Agencies and Marketers

In the past marketers had two basic campaign choices –  targeted email campaigns with a specific list or broader audience efforts with ad campaigns – like Facebook Ads. While ad campaigns offered a broader the audience, it was more difficult to target a specific user group.

Enter Custom Facebook Audiences, where ads can be served directly to people you know on Facebook or similar type audiences. This powerful feature is often underutilized, which is a shame because there is a myriad of benefits. At a glance, these include:

• Focused Targeting
• Finding Lookalike Audiences
• Increased ROI via Narrowed Targeting of Users That Fit Your Profile

Let’s take a little deeper look at these:

Focused Targeting – When you advertise on Facebook, you possess the ability to find and reach specific groups of people based on their location, demographics, interests and behaviors. Through Custom Facebook Audiences, you can use advanced features such as uploading contact email lists, targeting people who visit a website or specific website pages, targeting people have taken a specific action in an app, or targeting people who have engaged with content on a Facebook page. Focused targeting enables businesses to more accurately reach interested and engaged audiences.

Finding Lookalike Audiences – A Lookalike Audience reaches new people who are likely to be interested in your business (or your client’s business) because they’re like people who already are interested in your business. When you create a Lookalike Audience in Facebook, you choose a source audience (a Custom Audience not created with a data partner, your pixel data, your mobile app data or fans of your page) and Facebook identifies the common qualities of the people in it (i.e. demographic information or interests). The system then finds people within your specified location parameters who “look like” your target audience

Increased ROI via Narrowed Targeting – How do you achieve higher Return on Investment (ROI) with Facebook ads? The key is using audience targeting to achieve a better relevancy score. Like Google’s quality score, a higher Facebook relevancy score generally equates to lower CPCs and CPAs. Two ads with the same targeting can lead to very different results. For example, an ad with a relevancy score of 5 can have a 47-percent cheaper CPA and 37-percent cheaper CPC over an ad with a score of 3. That’s a huge difference, and to achieve results like this, it starts with your target audience.

Marketers who pay attention to their results data (Who has engaged with the ads? Who has bought? etc.) and adjust their audience lists accordingly are actively responding to their prospects changing needs. Moving a customer who has recently purchased from a prospect list to client list opens new opportunity to sell complimentary products, for example.

It is a waste of time and money to continue to serve the same ads to people who have moved on in their buyer’s journey. By adjusting the audience list, marketers can server prospects different ads that help move them along or up-sell an offering.

Automate in Real-time

Currently marketers must manually adjust their audience lists to include new prospects or to remove prospects that have become customers. However, the ActiveDEMAND automation solution provides integrated Custom Facebook Audiences protocols so agencies can leverage all the power of the real-time behavioral segmentation features, and directly use these contact lists in Facebook Audiences – in real time. Simply put, ActiveDEMAND will dynamically adjust audience lists in real time.

Now the automation takes care of the tedious tasks. For example, removing people who make a purchase out of the Facebook Ad list will no longer be shown the ad asking them to buy. This effectively eliminates excess spend on displaying ads to people who already made a purchase.

ActiveDEMAND does more than just post to your Facebook account. The platform performs real-time behaviour segmentation and adjusts the audience for you – all while tracking the performance of your social media efforts as they relate to your business goals.