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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4 Steps to Building an Engaging Presence on Social Media

#1: Build a Targeted Community

The first step is to build a community of people who care about what your brand has to offer.

It doesn’t matter if you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ page or all of the above. As long as you have a starting point, you can start building your audience on social media.

Haphazardly trying to build a large community won’t be very helpful. Your best bet will be to build a targeted community. How do you build targeted communities? Generally speaking, there are two ways.

Organic Community-Building

To build a community through organic means, you must provide share-worthy and useful content that’s relevant specifically to the audience you want to reach. The more your content (on any social network) gets shared, the more eyes see it.

Whole Foods shares recipes that its food-based community will enjoy and then share with others.

If you consistently produce enough great content, people naturally gravitate toward your brand. Be sure to leverage hashtags when appropriate so your content is categorized correctly and easy to find.

While it might sound cliché, content aimed at your specific intended audience will help lay the groundwork for organically building a loyal community.

Paid Community-Building 

Paid community-building is traditionally much faster than its organic counterpart.

By leveraging the paid advertising options of social media channels, you cansupercharge the growth of your community by hyper-targeting the people who are most likely to want to connect with you.

While most of the major social networks currently offer paid advertising options, I highly recommend leveraging Facebook ads to help build a targeted community.

Use targeting to put your paid social ads in front of the right people.

Facebook ads can be extremely useful when you’re trying to get in front of a particular group of people. The targeting options within Facebook ads are so granular that you can target users by interest, age, gender, language, education level and location.

If you’re an insurance company looking to build an audience, you should consider targeting people with interests relating to insurance, risk management, financial services and other interests that might be in the same arena.

With the right strategy, it’s entirely possible to acquire hyper-targeted fans for as little as $0.25 per fan. It doesn’t take a huge budget to make a big impact.

No matter what interest is related to your brand, there’s an audience for it on Facebook.

If you decide another social media network is a better fit for your brand, Twitter,LinkedIn and Google+ all offer opportunities for paid social ads.

#2: Leverage Unused Brand Assets

The next step is to perform a complete audit of your brand assets to identify unused or underutilized content. This process may be time-consuming; however, you can discover valuable pieces of content that have been previously overlooked.

Content Inventory

There are a few ways to do an audit of your brand assets. I recommend you start by asking a series of questions:

• What is your mission statement?
• What idea or concept created the brand originally?
• How many blogs do you have?
• How many images?
• What content are you not using for promotion?

These questions are meant to make you think less about what you are doing and more about what you aren’t doing.

Many brands have an extremely compelling story to tell and they don’t even realize it.

You know that feeling when you look under the bed to find that long-lost favorite t-shirt? That’s exactly the goal of searching for unused brand assets. You never know what you’ll find unless you look!

#3: Identify Indirect Content Opportunities

Now that you’ve rediscovered valuable brand assets, it’s time to map out your content strategy.

To draft a social media content plan, brands usually rely on concepts that are directly related to what they sell or do. This is a tad shortsighted, in my opinion. There are many other opportunities available when you take a step back and identify all of the concepts that are indirectly related to your brand.

For instance, if you are a real estate company, your social channels are probably filled with listings, employee information and maybe even home-buying blogs. Why not mix in some home decorating tips or famous homes from movies? This type of content will spark engagement and support your future “normal” content.

TOMS retweeted content from another brand that shares its values and will appeal to its followers.

Everything you post doesn’t have to be about what you offer, nor do you want to publish content that has nothing at all to do with your brand. Find a middle ground where you leverage content that isn’t exactly about your product or service, but is related to it.

Coca-Cola does a great job here leveraging National Pi Day.

Pi has nothing to do with Coke; however, people drink Coke while eating pie… and pie sounds likePi so this works.

#4: Listen to Your Community

The last part of this puzzle is to utilize content that comes from your social community. User-generated content (UGC) is the holy grail in social media. Everyone is looking for it! However, sometimes UGC isn’t as obvious as you’d think it would be. Most of the time, the good stuff is right in front of you and you don’t even see it.

When users reply to content on social sites, they’re basically telling you what they want. Pay special attention to the Comments section. This is where you’ll find ideas that you can turn into solid content campaigns.

We all know that listening is a huge part of social media; however, we have to know how to listen and what to listen for. It’s not just simply monitoring the conversation to make sure your community is happy. Truly listening to what they have to say can produce amazing content that you might not come up with on your own!

Warsteiner USA posted a plain text update asking a question about Thanksgiving recipes and received a reply that would make a great graphic or video.

Look to your comments and replies to find great content ideas from your community.

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How to Drive More Facebook Traffic to Your Website in 5 Easy Steps

Getting Facebook fans to your website (and then hopefully onto your email list) is even more critical with Facebook’s recent announcement of decreased organic reach for pages.

Use these five steps to help you get more traffic Facebook to your website.

#1: Make Sure You Have a Steady Stream of Shareable Content on Your Website

If you have a website that never changes, you’re going to struggle to get much traffic to it. Posting links to the same page on your site over and over is as futile as Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill.

These days, the name of the game is content marketing and you had better figure out how your business can participate.

The fresh, new content you post on your site is important—not only for social media marketing, but also for search engine optimization. Google rewards sites featuring fresh content with higher ranking. But you don’t have to post epic blog articles three times a week to win at the content marketing game. Posting something new and helpful once a week or even once a month can benefit your website traffic.

Here are some ideas that can help you brainstorm how you can add new content to your website:

• Post a weekly tip about your niche. It doesn’t have to be long; a paragraph or two with a nice photo will do just fine. Start with the frequently asked questions that come in from your customers.
• Post a weekly news bite with a photo about what is happening in your business. This works well for businesses that have events.
• Curate a list of top 10 helpful articles from around the web that you found that week. Add a short sentence about why you liked them.
• Interview someone in your office or in your industry. The interview doesn’t have to be live or with video (but that makes it even better). You could send the interviewee a list of 5-10 questions beforehand.

Roth Heating & Cooling posts quick tips that benefit their audience.

Not only will you increase the keywords on your site (which benefits you on search engines), you can use this material for social media postings and in your email newsletter. A win-win-win!

#2: Make it Easy to Share Your Content to Facebook on Your Website

Once you have fresh content, you need to make it shareable. Your first step is to add a social share plugin and/or Facebook Share buttons.

Use the Digg Digg plugin because it has all of the buttons you want to display and it floats along the side of the post as the reader scrolls through the article. But you may also want to consider adding static share buttons at the beginning and end of the post that are inline with the article. You can also do this with the Digg Digg plugin.

The Digg Digg plugin has the floating sidebar and inline sharing buttons.

Don’t ignore share buttons on the individual pages of your websites. While people may not be sharing your “Contact me” page, you may have good content on a resource page of your website that you want to allow people to share easily.

Also consider asking for a Facebook share if you feel you have a particularly helpful blog post. Remind readers at the end of your article by saying something like, “Did you find this article helpful? Feel free to share it on Facebook by using the buttons below.” Remember that people are mostly going to share something that is useful to them. When you’re creating content, always keep your customer’s benefit in mind.

#3: Optimize Your Facebook Posts

The next thing you want to do is make sure to optimize the way you post. There are basically three different ways you can post a link to your website, and depending on your audience (and how Facebook’s algorithm happens to be working at the moment), you can get different results.

The traditional way to post a link is just to cut and paste the link into the status section and allow the link to pull in the photo and metadata. The issue with this method is the photo that is pulled in can show up smaller if it isn’t a 1.91:1 ratio.

If the photo on your website is not sized optimally, the link won’t pull in a large photo.

When you have a photo that has the 1:91:1 ratio on your website, it appears larger in the news feed.

And when you have no photo or description at all on your article, the fields are blank.

Another way to post a link is to post a photo and then add the link into the status update with a little blurb about the link. The nice thing about this is that the description travels with the photo when it’s shared so you’re then controlling the message a bit more. The other nice thing is that photos can show up larger in the news feed.

Post an image with the link in a status update.

One technique that has been popular in the past to get greater reach is to post your link in the status section and then “X-out” the link data that is pulled in to change the post to “text only,” even though it has a link in it. The benefit of this in the past has been that text-only posts were getting more reach.

But Facebook recently announced that the new Facebook algorithm will show fewer text posts from pages. So we will have to watch how the effectiveness of this strategy changes.

Changing the post to a text-only post with a link may not work as well in the future.

With all of these approaches, you need to test which one gets the most engagement and drives the most traffic for you.

Once you post the content, you may want to consider boosting it with some advertising. See #5 for more information on advertising on Facebook.

#4: Optimize Other Places on Facebook to Add Links to Your Website

To drive more traffic to your website, make sure you have links in other parts of your Facebook page that people may be visiting.

Use your About page to direct people to different areas of your website.

Add links to your About page to direct people to different areas of your website.

Add links to your milestones.

Milestones stay on your About page and can have links in them.

Add links in your photo descriptions.

When someone clicks on your photo, they will see the photo description.

Use links in your photo descriptions—especially your cover photo, which will be clicked on more often.

Use custom tabs with links to your website.

Consider using an application like NetworkedBlogs to bring in links to your blog posts into the tab automatically.

People can easily access your most recent blog posts.

Optimize your personal profile.

Don’t neglect your own personal profile when considering how you can drive more traffic to your website. Make sure you’re sharing your blog posts to your personal profile and optimize your own About section with links.

Add links to your personal profile About section.

#5: Advertise

Advertising on Facebook can be a great option to get targeted traffic if you have a budget. And with Facebook’s recent announcements about decreased organic reach, advertising is going to be even more critical for marketers.

To drive traffic to your website, you can either create an ad from scratch with a link to your website, or boost content  that you’ve already posted. When you boost content, remember to post something that doesn’t have a photo that has more than 20% text in it or it won’t get approved by Facebook. You can use Facebook’s text overlay tool to measure the amount of text.

Boosting a post with a link in it can be a good idea.

One issue that I’ve found with boosting a post is that it doesn’t usually result in a lot of link clicks. You typically get more likes and comments on the post, which boosts the engagement of the post itself. However, if you truly want clicks to your website, you’re better off using the Ads Manager and choosing that objective.

For a better click-through rate to your website, use the Ads Manager.

Remember to use the news feed ads to help you improve your click-through rate even more because the ads in the right column do not get clicked as much.

Guide your website traffic to achieve your goals.

Finally, make sure you know why you’re driving more traffic to your website. If your website isn’t giving a call to action once your visitors get there, you’re missing the point.

Each piece of content on your website should do something to escort your potential customer further along your sales funnel. You might ask for people to comment on your blog post to engage with them, or tell people to sign up for a freebie so you can get them on your email newsletter list or even pick up the phone to give you a call.

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