A Custom Audience is an ad targeting option that lets advertisers find their existing audiences among people who are on Facebook. You can use the ads create tool or use Power Editor to create a Custom Audience.
Basically if you have an existing audience like an email list, a mobile app or a website you can create lists of those people on Facebook to target them with advertising.
There are four types of custom audiences:
- Data File Custom Audience
- MailChimp Custom Audience
- Custom Audience from Your Mobile App
- Custom Audience from your Website
Data File Custom Audience
This is the most straight forward of the Custom Audience types. Upload a .CSV file in the Facebook ads manager under Audiences. Your file should be a single column of data listing either email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs or mobile advertiser IDs. Facebook checks those email addresses against the one billion people registered to Facebook to create your custom audience. Processing takes up to half an hour, because of that giant database check that has to be performed.
Once your Data File Custom Audience is processed, we recommend that you segment your custom audience to further suit your needs. At the very least, segmenting your audiences will allow you to potentially lower the costs of your Facebook ads.
MailChimp Custom Audience
If you’re using the email marketing service MailChimp, Facebook has made it easier for you to create a custom audience. there are only few steps involved since both companies are working together to make this happen.
Custom Audience from Your Mobile App
Here’s where the fun really begins. If you have an app, Facebook makes it easy to create a custom audience of your app’s users.
Facebook Custom Audiences from Your Mobile App hinge on what’s called action taken. An action taken is a specific action that the user completes within your app. Facebook uses the examples of completing a purchase, opened the app, completed large purchases, reached a certain level in the game, abandoned a shopping cart or completed registration within the app. It’s important to think about the types of advertising and targeting you intend to do when placing Facebook’s tracking pixels inside your app. You also have the option of declaring how far back users should be kept in the custom audience, up to 180 days. You can also target the most active users if you choose and input other parameters (how much was purchased, what level of the game someone reached, etc).
Custom Audiences from Your website
If it ever seems like an un-purchased item from Amazon is tracking you across the internet, you’ve experienced retargeting and tracking.
By placing a Facebook tracking pixel on your site, you can create a custom audience of users on your website. As users visit your site they are automatically entered into the Custom Audience. The process to add a tracking pixel to your website is outlined in a Facebook help document. The website tracking pixels pick up the referral URL, browser info, and the person’s Facebook user ID and using the Facebook Tag API can capture custom data to your needs.
Are Facebook Custom Audiences right for you?
If you’re looking to engage your existing users, or those low-hanging fruit we were discussing earlier, the answer is yes. Your users are the ones who will be the most engaged by your content and amplify that content to their friends. If you think that you’ll ever have an interest in Facebook Custom Audiences, it’s a good idea to get started with them sooner rather than later. The sooner you get started, the easier it will be to tweak your Custom Audiences to perfect your targeting.
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