How to Use Facebook Website Custom Audiences

What Is Website Custom Audiences?

In its most basic form, Website Custom Audiences is a powerful tool that lets youcreate Facebook ads that target users who have visited your website. Now you can reach well beyond your core fans and email subscribers.

Catch the attention of recent website visitors with a relevant ad about your product or service.

WCA may sound quite a bit like Facebook Exchange (FBX), another way to retarget users on Facebook who visited your website. But FBX is created only through an approved third-party and can only create a domain ad that drives people to your website.

The special thing about a WCA is that it’s created and used within ads run through Power Editor or the self-serve ad tool. That means you can create any ad you typically could on Facebook. Your ad can be related to your Facebook page, a page post, offer, event or application.

The image above is an example of WCA in action. I created this ad to sell my one-on-one service and retarget anyone who has visited my website during the past 1-3 days.

I also run a similar ad targeted at non-fans who visited my website to increase my number of relevant Facebook fans.

Target recent website visitors to increase your relevant fan base.

The response to these and other ads using WCA has been incredible because I’m able to create something extremely relevant for those people who see the ads.

What Are the Benefits of Using Website Custom Audiences?

I’ve never been so excited about a new Facebook advertising feature—the impact WCA has on reach is remarkable. Partner it with your simple sales funnel and watch things get really interesting.

As I’m sure you know, relevance is the key to crazy ROI on Facebook. The more relevant the connection, the more likely the user is to buy.

That’s why I recommend a simple Facebook sales funnel that focuses on building a highly relevant audience, providing regular valuable content to build trust, collecting email addresses and selling.

Let me use my page as an example of the impact WCA makes when paired with a simple Facebook sales funnel.

I have a little over 40,000 Facebook fans. I also have an email list of about 17,000 people. Accounting for overlap, we can assume that makes about 50,000 unique people I can target with Facebook ads who are familiar with me.

Until the launch of WCA, I’d burn through my fans and email list pretty quickly when promoting a post or looking for a conversion. So I’d then move on to Lookalike Audiences and interests targeting.

Creating a Lookalike Audience.

Now, with the addition of WCA, I can generate ads that target recent visitors to my site and entice them to like my Facebook page or sign up for my webinar while memories of my content are fresh.

What group of people would be most likely to want to click on a link to my recent blog post? Someone who has previously visited my website, of course!

As I mentioned above, my highly relevant audience (fans and email subscribers) was previously about 50,000 people. I’ve since created a WCA with a duration of 30 days that consists of more than 115,000 users.

While we can assume some overlap with fans and email subscribers, it’s safe to say that I’m reaching at least 65,000 more highly relevant people who are intimately familiar with my content.

But the power of WCAs goes further: You can also target by specific pages or sections of your website people visited.

So, for example, I could create an ad for my Power Editor training course targeted at those who read a tutorial about Power Editor on my website. Or target those who visited the landing page for that course.

You can use WCA to exclude people as well. I could promote a post and exclude people who’ve already read it. Or I could promote my webinar or training course, but exclude anyone who’s already signed up.

That’s increasing efficiency and limiting waste!

How Do You Create Website Custom Audiences?

Whether you create a WCA from Power Editor or the Ads Manager, the process is the same with the exception of the first step. So let’s start there.

From the Ads Manager, click on Audiences in the left column, then click the green Create Audience button.

Create a WCA from the Ads Manager.

If you’re using Power Editor, click Audiences on the left side (old design) or click the Ad Tools drop-down at the top right and select Audiences (new design).

View audiences within Power Editor.

Next, click the Create Audience drop-down at the top left and select Custom Audience.

Create a custom audience within Power Editor.

From this point forward, everything is the same whether you create the WCA in Ads Manager or Power Editor.

First, you’ll be asked to agree to Facebook’s Terms for Custom Audience from your Mobile App and Website. You should accept that.

Accept Facebook’s terms for using custom audiences from your website.

If you haven’t previously created a custom audience, you may also get an error message indicating it isn’t yet active.

After accepting the terms, you’ll see the following screen. This is where the magic happens.

Create a WCA.

The top section is easy. Name your WCA something that will make sense later. For example, Website Custom Audience—All Pages—30 Day Duration.

You don’t have to fill in the description unless you need more space to describe this particular WCA. The name is most important because that’s what you’ll see when you’re targeting in an ad.

The Visited area is where you create your rules for determining which website visitors will be part of your WCA.

Create rules for your WCA.

You’ll be able to select Domain, URL or Path. You can use Domain by itself, or include it with one or both of the other options.

• Domain lets you target anyone who visited a particular domain within your control.
• URL lets you target anyone who visited a URL that contains a particular character or string of characters.
• Path lets you target anyone who visited a page that contains a particular character or string of characters within the path (after the domain).

You can include multiple character strings in each section if you want to create a basic OR statement. In the Path box, I used this option to target anyone who both visited jonloomer.com AND visited a page that included either website ORcustom OR turkeys in the URL.

Click the + button to create an additional AND statement rule. For example, you could create a new rule for Visited URL and assign particular page URLs from your site like this:

Visited URL: website-custom-audience facebook-ads

That statement, along with your established Domain, targets anyone who both visited jonloomer.com AND visited a page that included either website-custom-audience ORfacebook-ads in the URL.

You can also change the Contains Any option to Doesn’t Contain if you want to exclude particular page visits.

By default, the WCA’s duration is 30 days (but you can change that to be as short as 1 day or as long as 180 days).

The duration includes anyone in your audience who visited qualifying pages during the most recent 30 days (or the duration you set). This is dynamic and the clock starts ticking as soon as you click Create.

This WCA will generate a list of users who visited qualifying pages of your website during the past 30 days.

Finally, you’ll want to click the View Remarketing Pixel link at the top of the page.

You’ll need to paste your remarketing pixel between the <HEAD> tags of your website.

This brings up the code you need to copy and paste between the <HEAD> tags of your website’s template in order to put the pixel on every page of your website.

How Do You Use Website Custom Audiences?

When you create a Facebook ad, you’ll type the name of your WCA in the Custom Audience box.

When you have more than one WCA, you may want to include one in your ad, but exclude another. If you’re using the self-serve ad tool, you can only include, not exclude, a WCA.

Enter the name of your WCA to target those users in the self-serve ad tool.

However, if you’re using Power Editor, you have the ability to both target and exclude WCAs.

Target or exclude WCAs within Power Editor.

Need some ideas on how you could use WCAs? I have a few.

You can use “page likes” to target anyone who visited your website during the past 30 days who doesn’t already like your page (i.e., exclude current fans).

You can use “promote blog post” to target anyone who visited your websiteduring the past 30 days, but exclude anyone who already read that post.

Finally, you can use “sell product” to target anyone who visited the landing page for your product, but exclude anyone who visited the thank-you page and therefore has already purchased that product.

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How to Target Only Your Customers With Facebook

What’s a Custom Audience?

Your business undoubtedly has a database of customers. You may be using that database to keep email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs and app user IDs.

You can target the customers on these lists with your Facebook advertising, whether they are your current fans or not.

Instead of agonizing over demographics, precise interests and Partner Category targeting in an effort to reach your ideal audience, all you need to do is upload your customer list to Facebook. Facebook then matches up email addresses, for example, with the email addresses of users on Facebook.

Not all of the email addresses you collect are directly related to an email address of a Facebook user. Facebook tends to match up between 30-50% (sometimes more, sometimes less), depending on the quality of your list.

Once this list is generated in Facebook, you have a Custom Audience you can use in your advertising.

Are There Privacy Concerns?

I know this all sounds diabolical and mysterious, but it’s not. Privacy is not breached.

Here’s how Facebook explains the process:

The list will be hashed before being sent to Facebook. The system will match the encrypted data against Facebook’s active users, and build a custom audience in your account with everyone that matches your list.

Hashing and encryption are two ways of securing information. Encryption lets you later recover the original text by decrypting it. Hashing summarizes text into a short fingerprint that can’t be decrypted.

With just a hashed fingerprint, there’s no way to know exactly which text was summarized even though any given text always produces the same fingerprint.

…Facebook is able to find your ideal audiences for you without either company’s data leaving its respective servers.

It’s important to remember that an advertiser may already have your email address. If you are a Facebook user, Facebook already has your email address. Because the data that is sent to Facebook is hashed and encrypted, the email address itself never changes hands.

How You Can Use Custom Audiences

You own a list of email addresses of your current customers. So how can you make that list work for you with Custom Audiences?

1. Bring in new fans.

Create an ad that’s targeted at current customers on your email list who aren’t currently Facebook fans to get them to like your Page. Craft your messaging appropriately, knowing this audience is already familiar with your brand.

When you direct your message to a custom audience, the success rate tends to be higher and cost per new page like much lower when compared to relying entirely on precise interests and other targeting methods.

Do you use Facebook ads to attract new fans?

2. Target segmented customers.

If you segment your email lists according to customers who have made specific purchases, you can find great success with Custom Audiences.

Let’s say that you have a list of customers who purchased Widget 1.0. You launch version 2.0. You can craft a Facebook ad targeted at the people who purchased Widget 1.0, alerting them of the update.

Facebook advertising can be enormously effective when targeting prior customers through the use of Custom Audiences.

The beauty of this approach is that your target user doesn’t need to be a Facebook fan for it to work. These are people who already have an established level of trust with your brand. They have purchased your product. They are much more likely than the typical user to click through and buy.

How to Create Your Custom Audience

Have you been sold on using Custom Audiences? Great! Let’s create your first Custom Audience on Facebook.

#1: Use Power Editor

You can’t currently create Custom Audiences within the self-serve ad tool, although you can select ones that have already been created. You’ll need to use Power Editor to create them.

Power Editor is a bulk ad editing tool created by Facebook. It’s a browser plugin that currently works with most browsers. Simply go to Facebook Power Editor to get started.

It’s likely that this functionality will eventually be rolled out to the self-serve ad tool, but you should get into the habit of using Power Editor. You have much more control over targeting, placement and bidding, and it’s where the new features are rolled out first.

#2: Create a Custom Audience

On the left-hand side of Power Editor, click Audiences.

Click Audiences in Power Editor.

Next, click Create Audience and select Custom Audience.

Create your Custom Audience in Power Editor.

Now name your list, enter a description, choose the type of data (emails, UIDs, phone numbers or app user IDs) and upload the file.

Upload your customer list into Power Editor.

The file will need to be in CSV or TXT format. Make sure that the data is in one column, and you should remove the header row. Then click Create.

If the upload is successful, you’ll get the following message:

Did you get this message? Your Custom Audience has been created!

If you’re getting errors, take a look at your data to make sure all data is valid. For example, all email addresses need to be in the typical [name]@[domain] format. If not, Power Editor will return errors.

Be patient! Now you need to do as Facebook says and wait up to an hour (or more) for your audience to be ready.

Until it’s ready, the status will be listed as “Waiting.” When it’s ready, status will be listed as—you guessed it—“Ready.”

You’ll need to wait up to an hour for your Custom Audience to be ready.

Since not every email address will match up to a Facebook user, be prepared for the number of users in your Custom Audience to be lower than the number of users in your email list.

#3: Use Your Custom Audience

Okay, now your Custom Audience is ready. It’s time to put it to use!

In Power Editor:

When you create your ad, click on Advanced Options under Audience.

Click Advanced Options when creating an ad in Power Editor.

Then, enter the name of your audience within the Custom Audience field.

Enter the name of the Custom Audience you want to target with your ad.

If your audience is available, Facebook will begin prefilling the rest of the name as you are typing.

Also notice that there is an Excluded Audiences field. This can be handy if you want to exclude a segmented list from seeing your ad. For example, when promoting a product, you could exclude users who have already purchased it.

In the Self-Serve Ad Tool:

You know that I’d prefer you use Power Editor. But if you insist on using the self-serve ad tool, here’s how you’d target your Custom Audience within an ad there.

While creating your ad, there is a Choose Your Audience section that allows you tonarrow down your targeting by things like location, age, gender and interests. Also in that group is Custom Audiences.

Simply check the boxes associated with the Custom Audience(s) you want to use.

Select the audiences you want to target with your ad in the self-serve ad tool.

#4: Create Lookalike Audiences for Extra Credit

If you want to take this a step further, you can have Facebook generate an audience that is similar to the users within your Custom Audience. This is particularly useful if you don’t have a large customer list and you want to expand your targeting to reach a new but similar audience.

First, click Audiences on the left-hand side of Power Editor, like you did before when you were creating your Custom Audience.

Click Audiences in Power Editor.

Then select the Custom Audience you created earlier and click Create Similar Audience.

Select the Custom Audience you want to expand and click Create Similar Audience.

You will then have the option to create a lookalike audience based on Similarity or Reach.

Choose one country and create a lookalike audience based on Similarity or Greater Reach.

If you choose Similarity, Facebook will match up the users within your Custom Audience to the top 1% of users on Facebook most similar to those users. If you choose Greater Reach, Facebook will match up the top 5% of users.

Note that you will be able to create a lookalike audience for one country at a time. When you’re done, click Create.

As was the case before, you will now need to wait for Facebook to generate this new list. While waiting, the size will show “—” and the status will be “Waiting.”

Be patient while Facebook generates your lookalike audience.

The name of the lookalike audience is auto-generated, but you can edit it or add a description for reference later.

Now you can use this audience in the same way you would your Custom Audience you created before.

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