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.
