Facebook Custom Audiences

Hello Friends, welcome to learnvern.

In the last session we learned about Instagram Ads. Why are they important , how do they work, which formats are available on Instagram Ads and how do we run Instagram Ads?

In today’s session we will understand about a famous concept of Facebook and that is “Custom Audience”

What are “Custom audiences”,

How do they function?

What are pixels?

What is a Lookalike Audience?

All these concepts we will be covering in this unit.

You might have heard of this term “Facebook pixel”, it is used widely in agencies.

Again let me tell you, this is a very important interview question.

So what is facebook pixel?

As you can see from my screen I have shared a definition.

“A piece of code for your website that lets you measure, optimise and build audiences for your advertising campaigns.

One such code, which if you place on your website, then that code will :

• help you to measure your overall audience and
• Will help you to create your audience too

Right?

So it will help you in audience creation as well in measurement.

So how will this work?

For example:

You run an ad on Facebook, then the audience viewed your ad, visited your website and purchased your particular product.

So the facebook pixel, the code will get triggered. The code will run and get executed.

And you will get to see on the FAcebook Ads dashboard that so and so person has purchased your product.

So this is a very big advantage of Facebook pixel. This will measure everything, will share the details with you, and will report too.

Now let us understand how facebook pixels work?

So the very first thing when someone visits your website and takes an action, the pixel triggers.

And side by side it reports the action too.

Right?

So you can say that Pixel is your website’s “Observer”.

It observes the visitor visiting your website, his activities, what he does on the website.

Is he purchasing, or is he not purchasing or is he spending a lot of time on a particular webpage. Facebook pixel is like an observer. Right?

It is always rather 24 hours keeping an eye on the behaviour on your website, recording whatever activities the audience is doing and also observing it.

Facebook pixel has a major advantage and that is you can reach out to a user who has  already purchased from your website.

So for example if you are a brand that makes peanut butter.

Now peanut butter is one such product which if you normally consume and you like it then you might place a repeat purchase order. This is a grocery item.

So you as an advertiser can make this ad visible to that particular user again.

For example if he purchased today and you estimated that according to the data, the peanut butter will get consumed completely within 30 days. So you started to show this ad again to that user from the 35th day.

Got it?

And to do this Facebook pixel will help you. As the conversions will start increasing, Facebook pixel will get better and will get stronger. It will also get more understanding of the user’s behaviour on your website by which you can intelligently create more audiences.

Let us further understand what all Facebook Pixel can do.

The first thing that Facebook Pixel can do is “Measure cross device conversion”

Now what is “Cross device conversion”?

If any user who is travelling via a metro or the local train of Mumbai saw your ad while travelling but got converted on a desktop, what will Facebook Pixel do here. It will record the entire journey and will let you know that this is the same user who had signed in with a mobile but has checked out on the desktop.

So facebook pixel understands cross device connection and can report them too.

The second advantage is “Optimise delivery to people who are likely to take action”

Your facebook ad’s delivery will become better and it will run your ads in a way that it reaches out to the right set of relevant people who will be inclined and interested to buy your product.

So facebook, google, youtube, linkedin - all of these work on very strong Artificial Intelligence. Hence the more data you feed or provide,  the algorithm will make your ads more and more stronger.

The third option is “Create custom audiences from website visitors”

You can create custom audiences with the help of your website visitors.

We shall understand custom audiences in more detail in our upcoming slides.

Now, what is a custom audience?

Custom audience is a very important metric of Facebook.

A targeting option that lets you and helps you find your existing audience.

Right?

So for example if you have a family business and you are a new generation entrepreneur and you too wish to join your family business.

You realised that your parents or your forefathers who have been running this business for all these many years have been storing the details of the customers like the customer’s name, email id, mobile number, etc.  in an excel sheet whenever a transaction took place. They have stored this data since the inception of their business could be the last 5 years or 10 years or even more.

So what will you do now?

You can create a custom audience from that data and to create custom audiences you just need either the email address or the mobile number.

And as soon as you upload this data on Facebook, Facebook will then check how many people from the data uploaded are currently available on Facebook.

And for the data that matches, you can run ads on facebook and also on all the properties of Facebook like “Instagram”, “messenger”.

What will a custom audience do?

Custom audience is an awesome targeting option wherein by making use of the existing audience it will look for your customers and will show ads to them.

Advertisers can also create many such custom audience like

The visitors on your website can be shown your ad

The visitors on your app can be shown your ad

Whosoever has engaged with your content at any given point of time, you can show ads to them as well.

Let us now look at “Types of Custom audiences”

First is “Website custom audience”. This I had just explained to you.

Second we have is “App activity custom audience” - if a user has engaged with any activity on app, then you can once again reach out to the same user or audience by creating a custom audience of your brand.

The third is “Customer list audience”.

If you have gathered data for a long period of time, the offline data, maybe you attended an event and from there you managed to gather data of around 500 people. So you have a customer list which you can make use of as a custom audience.

Then we have the “engagement custom audience”.

Let us understand how “website custom audience” works.

You integrate the pixel on your website, then after this you can create such an audience where having observed their actions you can show a particular ad to them.

Let me give you an example to help you understand this better.

I was checking out for a product on Amazon and i added that to my cart but i did not “check out”

So I got the ads of the same product again, I got an email regarding this ad and also the same ad was visible to me on facebook and on other websites too.

This is possible only and only because of “Custom audience”

Right?

Got it?

So here i have given some examples:

“Added a product in the cart” - you can make an audience on this. So let us say they are 500 in number, people like me who added products to their cart but did not check out, you can make a custom audience of those people. You can give a discount code to all those 500 people, mentioning them to avail this 5% discount coupon of that product and check out. So with this 5% coupon code we tried to push for additional sales.

So these are a few ways through which you can create a custom audience.

The second custom audience is “App activity custom audience”

So using the Facebook SDK, you can pass data and create a custom audience.

So what kind of custom audience will this be?

These audiences will be those who installed your app, or took a particular action on the app. So you can show any ad to these users on Facebook.

Then the third is “Customer List custom audience”

I had given an example of a family business if you remember, in a similar way you can create a customer list. You will just need an email id or a mobile number. So either of these 2 will be sufficient, and does not require both of these details. So it is either the email address or the mobile number. With this the Facebook will determine where their profile is, and how many of these people are active and accordingly facebook ads will be made visible to them.

The biggest advantage of this is the audience that you are targeting here, this set of people  are the ones who have already purchased your product once. If you recall the family business example I had given, this is exactly the same. So if they get to see your ad again there is a high chance that they get interested and they get inclined to buy your product again because they have already bought your product / services before.

So I think “customer list custom audience” is one of the awesome tools of Facebook. I insist you should definitely try this out and explore it.

Then we have “Engagement custom audience”

What happens in this?

You run a video on Facebook and the user watched 50% of your video but did not watch any further. So if the user has watched 50% of it and has engaged with the content that means you can target that particular user again. Thus you can create such an audience who have engaged with your content in some form or the other. This audience is called the “Engagement custom audience”.

Last we have is “Lookalike audience”

Lookalike audience is also a powerful feature. I personally make use of it and also I make use of this for my agency. This is used for a lot of clients and agencies.

So how does a lookalike audience work?

Let me go back to that example of the family business where your parents and forefathers have collected a lot of data. And assume that the data is of 10,000 people who in the last 5 years have purchased items from your shop or from your showroom.

So what will the lookalike audience do?

You created those audiences as a custom audience on facebook and suppose that data was of 5000 or say 10,000. You uploaded that data on facebook and facebook matched 50% of that data. So out of 5000 people facebook managed to find 2500 of them whom you can target again. What will the lookalike audience do now?

Lookalike audience will try to understand the profile of those 2500 people, their interests, likes, and will study their behaviour and the activities they perform. Thus will expand its reach and will make this 2500 data to a data of 25,000 and this 25,000 data will then become a data of 2, 50,000 people. Thus this means that facebook will bring in only such audiences whose characteristics match to those 2500 people. Characteristics like their personality, their behaviour and their media consumption. Thus it will expand the characteristics and thereby expand their audience size.

What do you say friends, isn't this an awesome feature?

I personally find it awesome.

As on date, the Lookalike feature is used by a lot of brands, a lot of advertisers too.

So definitely this is a very strong feature of facebook ads.

Let us look at “Remarketing”.

A couple of minutes back I had given an example where I had left out the products in the cart without checking out. So the product’s ad is again shown to me. This is remarketing.

Let me give you one more example of “Makemytrip”

If I am making a search for the flights from Delhi to Mumbai for a particular date say for example for the 5th of January I want to check the flight tickets for Delhi to Mumbai. I only want to check the fares of the flights and I do not buy the tickets. So what will makemytrip do here? It will save the data, that is the cookies also called as temporary internet files. So makemytrip will note that this particular user had searched for this particular flight for this specific date. So this data will get stored in its database. Now, whenever I visit any property of facebook, or facebook app or if I am watching videos on facebook then the ad of makemytrip for the same date and same airline will be shown to me.

Right?

So this is remarketing.

This means that I had an intent to buy that ticket but for any reason I did purchase that ticket that time. So this remarketing will remind me again, will try to tell me that you wanted to buy the ticket but you did not purchase it then. Here is the coupon for you using which you can now buy the tickets. Or it will also prompt you to check out for the other airline options and purchase the flight tickets.

So remarketing is again one of the best features in Facebook ads that you can use. The users with high intent, who have shown their intent to purchase your product or the service, can reach out to them again. So you can also create a remarketing list, Google ads also has this feature. Hence Remarketing is considered as a very powerful tool in Facebook ads.

That is all for today.

If you have any queries related to our session today regarding the “Custom Audience Pixels”, then you can write to us by logging to our website forums.learnvern.com. Our expert team will try to address your queries as soon as possible.

In the next session we will learn about “Youtube ads” and the different formats available in youtube ads.

Thank you!