We all agree: Facebook Custom Audiences are one of – if not the most – essential tools for successful Facebook advertising campaigns.
In this post, we will go through everything you need to know about Custom Audiences – from set up to advanced implementation to tactics.
If you’re short on time, or want this information offline, download the fully updated free ebook: The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Custom Audiences.
If you’re already well versed in Facebook Custom Audiences, feel free to skip around within the article. Here’s the table of contents:
- How To Create a Facebook Custom Audience
- Types of Custom Audiences
- How To Create a “Customer List” Custom Audience
- How To Create a Website Custom Audience
- How To Create an App Activity Audience
- How To Create an Engagement Custom Audience
- How To Create a Lookalike Audience
- Targeting Facebook Ads to Custom Audiences
- 3 Ways To Boost Your Campaigns with Custom Audiences
- Advanced Custom Audiences with AdEspresso
If you’re new to this, make sure you read from the beginning! If you have any questions about a section, leave a comment!
How to Create a Facebook Custom Audience
To create your first Custom Audience, go to the ”Audience” section of the Facebook Power Editor or Ads Manager.
In the Ads Manager, it’s under the Tools section. Select “Audiences.”
In Power Editor, it has its own section, right under the the toolbar right beneath your ad account number:
Since this is your first Custom Audience, you’ll need to create a new one by clicking the green “Create Audience” button. A popup window will open and ask you to pick which type of audience you’d like to create:
Types of Custom Audiences
There are many types of custom audiences, and Facebook is increasing them every day.
- Customer List (a.k.a. Standard) Custom Audiences
A list of emails, phone numbers, or Facebook User IDs that Facebook will match them with it’s users. Facebook will usually match between 60-80% of the contacts on your list. Uploading this list usually has to be done manually, unless you use a Custom Audience Sync tool. - Website Custom Audiences
Instead of users’ email addresses or phone numbers, you can insert a Facebook Pixel tracking code on your website and target your Facebook Advertising to all users that have visited a specific page on your website during a set time period (up to 180 days)! - App Activity Custom Audiences
You can create audiences based on what actions people take when they use your app – either on Desktop or Mobile. Mobile has outpaced Desktop on Facebook, and the trend continues. If your business has an app associated with it, it needs to be utilizing custom audiences on Facebook. - Engagement Custom Audiences
You can create audiences of those who engage with certain ad types or your page. The duration of these ad types is up to 365 days, although the more recent is often better – it is engagement after all.
- Lookalike Audiences
Once you’ve created a Custom Audience, you can ask Facebook to create a broader “Lookalike Audience” to target your ads to. Facebook will look for patterns and characteristics your current users, leads, or customers, have in common – such as age, gender, or interests – and create a much bigger list of very similar users who most likely have never interacted with your business before!
We’ll go through how to create each one of these audience one-by-one, and then follow up with some tactics on how you can utilize them.
How To Create a “Customer List” Custom Audience
Let’s select the “Customer List” options. These are where you can put your leads – or potential customers. You’ll have two options to sync your customer lists:
- Manually upload your audience in a .txt or .csv le.
- Synchronization with your Email CRM to your Facebook Ads Account
1 – Manual Upload
As Facebook only offers MailChimp integration, chances are, you’ll need to prepare a file containing the contacts you want to add to your Custom Audience. Use a CSV/Excel file or open a simple text editor and insert one value per line like this:
- email1@gmail.com
- email2@gmail.com
- email3@yahoo.com
- email4@outlook.com
Note: you can’t mix different data types – so it needs to be either all emails, or all phone numbers, etc.
Give your Custom Audience a short, easy-to-remember name that describes this specific audience. Some ideas include “Former customers,” “Email signups,” or something similar.
You’ll eventually want to use this field to insert notes every time you add a new audience.
2 – Syncing with Your Email CRM
With a Custom Audience Sync tool, you can make sure the leads that you acquire in your email list are automatically synced to your custom audiences (or vice versa, with Facebook’s extremely powerful Lead Ads).
With AdEspresso’s Data Sync feature, you’ll never have to do a “manual upload” again! We have constantly updated custom audiences based on your email or customer lists! For more info, check out our Facebook data sync feature here or sign up for a Free Trial (it’s included!).
How To Create a “Website Custom Audience”
What do you do if you don’t have a big enough database of emails, Facebook User IDs, or phone numbers to create your own Custom Audiences?
You guessed it: Website Custom Audiences! This feature doesn’t require you to have any data about the users you want to target. All you have to do is wait for a user to visit your website. Thanks to a special tracking code – the Facebook Pixel – Facebook will recognize users and automatically add them to an Audience, making them ready to be re-targeted with advertising.
How To Install and Verify The Facebook Pixel
For all others (don’t worry, you can do it!), go to your Facebook Pixel Tab in Ads Manager
Important Note: There can only be ONE Pixel per Ad Account!
- Click Create a Pixel (if you already have a Pixel, you won’t see the “Create a Pixel” button)
- Enter a name for your pixel. Since there’s only one pixel per ad account, choose a name that represents your business.
- Make sure you’ve checked the box to accept the terms
- Your Facebook Pixel tracks multiple events depending on the page.
You’ll want to add the Pixel to all pages you want to track, so ask a developer to help, or use a plugin that automatically does this for you. The Pixel will also slightly change if you want to track things outside of just “website visitors” (like leads, purchases, etc.).
For WordPress, you’re in luck: we have a 100% free plug-in, Pixel Caffeine.
And if you want to check to make sure your Facebook Pixel is working, download the free Google Chrome Extension, Pixel Helper.
What are Standard Events?
The Pixel doesn’t just track “visitors.” The Pixel, if installed correctly, will track multiple events that website visitors take on your site with slight variations of the code. 
We won’t dive into each unique event (like how it tracks your leads and customer purchases), but we recommend getting a developer involved to maximize the amount of tracking you can do on your site.
Advanced Website Custom Audiences
Note: This section on advanced WCAs is intended for marketers reasonably experienced with Facebook’s Custom Audiences.
Facebook released upgrades in 2016 that allowed highly detailed targeting based on the intensity of interest visitors display while they are on your website. Basically, you can start targeting your most interested prospects before you even know who they are!
Under Website Traffic, choose the “Custom Combination” parameter to get started. You’ll need to switch over to “Advanced Mode” to see these features, and Facebook may or may not have rolled out all of them to your particular ad account. You can target:
- Frequency: how many times a website visitor performs an action, i.e. visits a page. This is currently the most robust and has been rolled out to the most ad accounts
- Dynamic date: Allows you target visitors who have visited over a range of dates rather than a set number of previous dats
- Aggregate values: this is the total amount of time a person has spent on a page or combination of pages
- Devices: this includes Android, iOS, desktop, and other mobile devices. You can exclude or include each one.
Additionally, you can combine the above options with targeting based on the Standard Events website visitors take as well.
The combinations are bordering on endless, so don’t get too lost with it all! We recommend keeping it simple to start, and experimenting with just the Frequency first!
How To Create an “App Activity” Custom Audience
With mobile being the dominant platform for Facebook ads, it only makes sense that creating audiences based on app activity is quickly becoming one of the leading forms of custom audiences.
For example, you can target people who previously used your app, but have not come back to your app within the last month. Or you can target people who have added an item to their cart on your app, but never actually purchased it. Target them with a discount coupon and voila!
You can create audiences based on actions a user did or didn’t take within your app!
There are 14 actions (or non-actions) you can currently target, but the most popular are:
- Recently Opened yourApp
- Recently Completed a Purchase
- Completed Large Purchases
- Achieved a Certain Level in your Game
How To Create an “Engagement” Custom Audience
One of Facebook’s newest custom audiences is engagement. In other words, how people interacted with your ads or your Facebook page.
These 4 types of engagement custom audiences really open up the doors for businesses that lack the volume of audience size with other options.
Video Engagement Custom Audiences
When you create an ad with a video, you’ll be able to create custom audiences of everyone who viewed the video or just a percentage of the video! You can do video advertising, just to engage users to get them to know your brand.
This can now be it’s own custom audience, that you can send to your sales page, an e-book, or a more traditional ad!
Lead Ads Engagement Custom Audiences
As a marketer, we’re sure you know of Facebook’s Lead Ads – we even gave you a guide on how to sync your Lead Ads with your Email CRM. But did you know that you have the ability to target those people who opened your Lead Ad, but didn’t convert?
They almost gave you their phone or email…but something stopped them. With our highly niche re- targeting, you can target them again with another Lead Ad, or even a more traditional ad that takes them to a submission form on a landing page!
Canvas Engagement Custom Audiences
Impressing a lot of people with your Canvas ads, but aren’t getting the sign ups you hoped for? Now you can re-target anyone who played around or checked out your Canvas ad!
Page Engagement Custom Audiences
You can now target those who interact with your ads or your page. This means all those likes, comments, and shares are no longer vanity metrics! Rejoice!
Confused by all the options? Let us break it down:
Everyone who engaged with your Page
Everyone who visited your Page or engaged with your Page’s content or ads on Facebook or Messenger.
Anyone who visited your Page: Anyone who visited your Page, regardless of the actions they
took.
People who engaged with any post or ad:
Only the people who have engaged with a Page post or ad. Engagement includes reactions (Likes, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry), shares, comments, link clicks or even carousel swipes.
People who clicked any call-to-action button:
Only the people who clicked any available call-to- action button on your Page. For example: “Shop Now”
People who sent a message to your Page:
Only the people who sent a message to your Page.
People who saved your Page or any post:
Only the people who saved your Page or a post on your Page.
Keep in mind, the audience of page engagement has to be at least 20 people!
How To Create a “Lookalike” Audience
While standard custom audiences are great for re-engaging people who already had an interaction with you, lookalike audiences allow you to find hundred of thousands of users that don’t know you yet, but are very likely to become your customers.
It’s not hard to guess how powerful this feature can be. For example, you could create a Custom Audience with 10,000 of your customers, and get a Lookalike Audience with 200,000 people who are very similar to your customers and ready to be targeted with advertising!
The smallest lookalike audience, by default, is 1.9 million. You can create a lookalike audience of:
- Page Fans
- Email Lists
- Current/Previous Customers
- Website Custom Audiences
- App Activity
- Engagement (Video,App,Posts,andmoreverysoon)
- Conversions/Standard Events
For more advice, check out our post on Facebook lookalike audiences.
Note: A lookalike audience is created for only ONE country. This can be very tedious for international brands as they have to create multiple audiences in Power Editor. In comparison, with AdEspresso, creates lookalike-by-country audiences much faster.
Targeting Your Facebook Ads To a Custom Audience
Targeting audiences is extremely simple. Start with opening the Facebook Ads Manager or Power Editor and create a new ad.
After you’ve created your ad’s creative, you’ll get to the “Audience” section. Choose the first option, “Custom Audiences”.
Just start typing the name of the Custom Audience you want to target and select it from the autocomplete list. If you want, you can select more than one Custom Audience to increase your reach.
Once you’ve selected an audience, you’ll notice that hovering your mouse cursor over it will cause two icons to appear. The X deletes your audience and clicking the down arrow gives you the option to exclude the audience.
If you’re an e-commerce business, make sure you read our e-commerce custom audience blog post – it’s packed full of tips!
3 Ways To Boost Your Campaigns With Custom Audiences
Now that you know how to create all different types of audiences, it’s time to switch from tutorials to tactics.
How you segment your lists really depends on what kind of business you are running. Let me just give you a couple of examples and then I’ll leave it to you to understand what’s better for you.
1) Grow Your Facebook Page’s Likes (Cheaply)
If your product is a long-term asset that every serious business should seek, Custom Audiences can be a cheap way to have your contacts like your page. Simply create a Facebook Ads campaign targeted to a Custom Audience containing all your contacts.
To avoid wasting money, exclude all of your existing Page fans from your targeting options. They’ve already liked your page and typically won’t add value. Chance are many of your existing customers didn’t bother to like your page. This is a shame as it means they are – by way of their money – your biggest fans.
2) Regain Lost Customers
How many times have you discovered a great site only to forget about it later? This clearly happens often, even if you’ve bought a great product. This may be the case for your old customers, as well.
To solve this, create a Custom Audience with a list of all the people who have bought something from you in the past, but haven’t bought anything recently, and target them with ads about your new products. They already know and trust you since they’ve purchased from you in the past. Leverage this! Remind them that they’ve done business with you in the past, and maybe offer them a sweet deal since they are long time customers.
In this specific case, the best type of Facebook ads are Right Column or News Feed Ads pointing to an ad hoc landing page to re-engage those users. Don’t underestimate Right Column Ads, they are less sexy and people click them less but most of the time they are really cheap!
Remember, they already know, and probably trust you, so leverage this to convert them. Craft a very clear and friendly message, use your brand in the ad’s picture or title … they already know it and it will bring trust!
Here’s a nice example from an expert marketer, Neil Patel. He knows I already visited his blog and subscribed to his blog so he boldly use his name and picture in the ad.
If you want to sweeten the deal tell them you’ve missed them and that you’ve a tasty special offer just for them because you care about your customer.
In this case there’s no need to exclude from the target those who are already fan of your page, just target your custom audience and split test some creatives and demographic audience to increase your conversion rate displaying ads just to those subsets who perform better.
You can get even more complex by targeting those who abandoned their shopping carts, but more on that in e-commerce custom audiences.
3) Up-sell upgrades/new products to existing customers
It’s easier to sell to someone who has already bought from you than to a total stranger.
Create a custom audience with your most active users, and if it makes sense for your business, segment them based on the kind of product they usually buy or the level of subscription they’re in if you’re selling a SaaS solution.
Once you’ve segmented them create a campaign with a very specific ad. Don’t waste time with generic advertising about you … they are loyal customers …promote the sale of a product that would fit well with what they’ve already bought or tease them with the benefits of upgrading their subscription.
I’d suggest you to split test the different custom audience you’re targeting and see which one generates more sales.
With AdEspresso (a B2B software) as an example we usually split our lists this way:
- Users who have signed up but never created a campaign, users who created a campaign but stopped using the platform, active users
- By advertisement type: Users who promote mobile app install, users who promote ecommerce websites, users who promote Facebook pages
- Newsletter subscribers that have not yet signed up for AdEspresso
We throw in even more tactics in our ebook, The Ultimate Guide To Facebook’s Custom Audiences – so make sure you check it out!
Also, don’t be shy to experiment with different types of Facebook ads with your custom audiences. They are over 12 as of this post!
Advanced Tactics with AdEspresso
AdEspresso currently offers two options available to its users that are a step up from Power Editor:
Custom Audience Search with Rapid Lookalike Creation
With our custom audiences filters, you’ll easily be able to instantly create lookalikes from all your existing audiences.
Just pull them with our simple and easy
to use search function! You can also search by custom audience name in addition to the source.
AdEspresso’s Asset Manager
With our asset manager, you can now create and organize audiences in ways not previously possible. You can create hundreds of unique audiences by combining the power of interest targeting (non custom audiences) with custom audiences. Give it a go!
Final Word on Custom Audience Rules & Legality
Finally let’s quickly review some bureaucracy. I encourage you to read the full Facebook Custom Audience Terms of Service. But since I can guess most of you won’t, here’s a very quick summary of the TWO things you MUST know if you don’t want to have your account suspended.
- You can only create custom audience with data (email, phone numbers, UID) you have received permission to use. Adding it to your privacy policy will be enough. Just to be even more clear: you can’t use data scraped on public web sites or on Facebook. Yes, no Facebook scraping!
- You can’t keep people in your custom audiences that have requested to Opt Out of your other customer lists (i.e. your email lists). So if someone unsubscribes from your newsletter you should remove him or her from your custom audience as well.
In short: keep your custom audiences always updated!
If you sign up for an AdEspresso free trial, you’ll get to experience this first hand with our built-in Custom Audiences Sync feature!
Conclusion
Facebook Ads Custom audiences are a very powerful tool to increase your sales at a very competitive price.
I’m sure you can find many other creative ways to get the most out of them, please share them in the comments!
As always, my suggestion to get the most out of your marketing budget is to always split test your Facebook Ads … with AdEspresso of course!
Hi Massimo..
Could you explain me a couple of stuff:
1. When you tell: ” Finally when setting up the targeting of your campaign select your previously created Custom Audience and exclude from your target all the people who are already fans of your page (they’re already fan, you’d waste your money targeting them).”…
How can i do it????
2. Could i Create Custom Audience Ads where take people to my Website?????? It Is Works??? I think on the Neil Patel Example that you gave us….That Ad drive to his Website?????
Thanks a lot for your help..
Happy New Year for you.
Andres M
Hello???????
Somebody is here…this is a blog???????
Could be nice listen and Answer.
Thank you.
Hey Andres,
thanks for the comment, sorry for the huge delay, it was a pretty busy period with the Christmas holidays and travels back to Us.
For your first question, when creating a new campaign on Facebook you can add a custom audience in the Audience field in the “CREATE YOUR AUDIENCE” section. To remove people who alre already fan of your page in the Connection field select “Advanced connection targeting” and then insert your page name in the exclude box.
for your second question, sure you can target custom audiences with any Facebook Ads type. That include website ads.
Massimo
Hi Massimo,
Great blog article here thanks for the information. Is Facebook still allowing for creation custom audience? I can’t seem to find that section on facebook power editor or ad manager… Please let me know.
Yes they do, this is very strange, unless it’s a country/account specific limitation you should have the Audience button on the left menu of the Facebook Ads Manager!
Do you need to add Facebook language in your email privacy policy? If you look at the terms/conditions it says that users should give consent.
I’d say it’s nice to have but not strictly necessary, the important thing is that they approve your ToS and privacy policy and you state that you can use their email also for advertising purposes.
Hi Massimo,
Question for you.
Is there any way to remove someone from a custom audience if you only know their fb username?
A portion of my list only has email addresses and I can’t match the person’s username to any email.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for asking Nick, this is indeed a very good question. If you go on the Audience manager in Facebook Ads Manager: ttps://www.facebook.com/ads/audience_manager/ you can click on an audience and you’ll then be allowed to upload a list of users you want to either add or remove to your Custom Audience. It seems like this is not tied to the original format which you used to create your audience so you may be able to send User IDs even tho’ you created the audience with emails. Not tried it honestly, let me know if it works for you!
Hi Massimo,
I’m getting the following error when importing a mailchimp list to create a custom audience:
“We found 1 error: Choose Target Country: Please pick at least 1 country for your audience” –
Is there a reason FB is requiring me to pick a country for a custom audience? Why do I have to choose – I have customers from all over the world.
Hey Andy, that’s pretty strange. The country limit is usually just for Lookalike audiences. I’ve never tried the Mailchimp integration so not 100% sure what’s the problem. Soon we’ll start having native integration in AdEspresso as well and that will solve the problem 🙂
Hello, I was wondering how Custom Audience works. How does Facebook use a list of emails I uploaded? Does it show my ads “exactly” to the email owners or does it use my list to arrange a sort of look-alike target. For instance, if I submit a list of hotel emails, does Facebook understand my Custom Audience is the “hotels” category or does it show my ads to the hotels it’s able to couple my emails?
I tried to test the service uploading a few hundreds of emails and I’ve been answered that only about 11% of them will be reached. So the campaign has been put on hold. Last question: if the list of emails isn’t used “exactly” as it is, where’s fuss about using emails found on websites? Many thanks,
Hey Marino,
plain Custom audiences won’t target any similar user, they’ll only target the emails you’ve uploaded. The problem is Custom Audiences are not meant to target emails found on websites 🙂 That’s actually a violation of Facebook’s Terms Of Services.
They are meant to target users who opted in into your mailing list and agreed to be contacted by you. Also mail found on website are usually generic contact emails not the one people use to access Facebook. That’s why Facebook was able to match only 11% of your emails with real users. And also why they interpreted this a signal that the email list was low quality and probably scraped and rejected it 🙂
Hey Massimo,
Great post here. I have used Facebook Ads in the past and did fairly well. I had stopped for a number of years.
Now I see facebook ads has made a number of changes. It’s great that you customize your audiences even further and create profiles. Especially for retargeting.
I’ll have to go through this article again once I start back using facebook ads.
Thanks for sharing!
You’re welcome! Nowadays Custom Audiences are an essential part of Facebook Advertising and it’s great to see Facebook constantly improve them!
Hi, I just started fb ad campaign for my blog for testing purpose with a budget of Rs 100 per day. I created custom audience of 20 emails with 10 genuine and 10 dummy ids. But my ad is not shown to any of my custom audience. Infact ad is liked by some completely unknown people. Can someone help urgently ??
There must be some problem with how the campaign is setup (or maybe you are promoting a public post that can be reached organically through your page?)
Either way an ad targeting a custom audience of 20 of which only 10 are real user would likely have a reach of 0 and would not be able to spend a single dollar. An audience of 10 is just too small to have any effect.
We all agree: Facebook Custom Audiences are one of – if not the most – essential tools for successful Facebook advertising campaigns.
Can You Still Use @Facebook Emails In Adexpresso? If So, Will Facebook Still Except Them Through This App/Adexpresso?
You’re post is just great. What an amazing article. I’m actually working with Perfect Audience my re targeting campaigns. It’s great that you customize your audiences even further and create profiles. I got some useful tips and I will definitely start to market to the “unopened” segment.
Got a question that has been really hard for me to figure out and I cant see the answer by any site:
How to make website custom audience at purchase event for a “specific product”.
I have my ecom store. I have 50+ products. When I create website custom audinece of purchase events it gives me like 10,000 in total. I want to get purchase event data of my specific products.
What I’m doing?
I create custom audience “custom combination”. Then I choose purchase event ( value = content name = I put the whole product url ). I still get the whole number of accumulated purchases.
Can you solve this issue?
Hey Bilal, that’s supposed to be used with Dynamic Product Ads advanced data, it won’t accept the url, it needs the pixel to be configured to pass Facebook product name, id and more.
When I find the right audience, prices go higher : (
Anyway, very useful tips, thank you.
Hello Massimo,
I have used Facebook custom audience option last time , there were a option to custom by Interest ,but this option is not appearing in latest update of Facebook ads manager .
Can you help me to custom audience by interest.
if there is any PPT of PDF available with you related to this please send me .
I managed to get my custom audience uploaded and review demographic comparisons and retail spending which is great. On the “Page Likes” tab I get the message “We don’t have enough information for this audience to show relevant pages”. Any idea on why that is if I have enough audience for the demographic profiling?
Thanks and great article, really useful.
Hi Massimo,
talking about privacy policy… Is it enough to have newsletter subscriptions in order to be authorised to create custom audiences out of people’s emails? I know the data gets hashed when uploading in FB, but how do companies handle this? Is there something to be said about it in your privacy policy? I haven’t been able to find any example text about this on company’s own privacy policies… Seems like no company really mentions that they will deliver you data hashed to facebook. Am I wrong?
Hey Massimo – I can’t seem to find a way to exclude items when creating an audience. For example I want to exclude all Realtors from “job title” and certain employers. Is this something I should be doing in Ad Manager then importing the custom audience into AdEspresso?
Would prefer to do it all in one place.
Completed the form to download The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Custom Audiences, only to be redirected to a 404 error page. Shady.
It is so strange you got the error beth 🙁 I’m sorry! I checked and it works now. Anyway you can download the Guide here https://ebooks.adespresso.com/facebook-custom-audiences-guide
I have created custom audiences for people who have engaged with our pages but I am unable to create ads as facebook says audiences too small / specific. They are 3000 / 4000
It’s weird that you now have the “Multiple Audience” test ability, BUT only limited to test Saved Audiences.
I want to test multiple WCAs and for that, back to Facebook I go
Very awesome tutorial! Can’t wait to try these methods out!
Ciao Massimo, vivo e lavoro in Nuova Zelanda in una media agency e, insieme al mio team, stiamo cercando di capire quale possa essere la soluzione migliore per uno dei nostri clienti.
Questo cliente e’ un’agenzia immobiliare locale che vuole targettizzare in maniera estremamente precisa tutte le persone che vogliono vendere casa.
Quello che stiamo cercando e’ un tool che permetta di intercettare tutti quegli utenti che sui social media stanno parlando di “vendere casa” e raccoglierli in un’unica lista da caricare su Custom Audience di Power Editor.
AdEspresso permette questo? Intanto grazie mille per i tuoi articoli nel blog di Adespresso, molto chiari!
hello, Can I create Custom Audiences with @facebook.com email addresses?
HI Massimo,
Thank you for the insightful information.
I am hoping you can help. I am trying to import my customers onto facebook. I have loaded the data into customer audience and have set up a couple of campaigns selecting my data.
My questions is when I pay Facebook am I paying to boost the advert to new customers over and above “my customer audience” or am i paying to target my own data?
In which case am I paying twice for my customers (to recruit them and then to recruit them to my facebook page?)
If so what is the cheapest and best way to reach “my customer audience” once I have loaded the data?
Just so you know my customer audience is in the millions more than tens of thousands, hence my concern with costs.
I really appreciate any help you can offer.
Kind regards
Scott
Hello Massimo,
Great article!
I am trying to create a custom audience based on combining Events just like in one of your screenshots in “Advanced Website Custom Audiences”. I saw there is an option “Advanced Mode” but I do not have such option in my account. Do you know why and how can I use it?
Thanks in advance,
Keep the spirit!
Great information! Well explained. Can somebody help me with deciding which type of custom audience would perform better to generate leads for legaltech firm?
Hello Massimo, Nice article, useful information even in 2017 years. I have a question if I want to target facebook group as audience. Is it possible? Some creative way?
thanks for the post
It is in reality a nice and helpful piece of information.
I’m happy that you just shared this useful info
with us. Please keep us informed like this. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks a lot! You have explained the process really well.
A Custom Audience from a client list is a sort of crowd you can make made up of your current clients. You can target advertisements to the group of onlookers you’ve made on Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network.
Facebook is competitively priced, but I wonder how effective it is given that so many people are using it and so many people have little interest in FB ads…. U are right about not spamming people who have opted out. I don’t think you will achieve anything by forcing your marketing message on anyone. So perhaps you can try actually targeting people who like your products since they have already proven that they are likely to buy. Maybe give some attention to Treepodia and their video retargeting campaigns?
I agree with the other comments here that Facebook is competitively priced, but I also have my reservations about its effectiveness as a medium for video retargeting initiatives. AdEspresso writer Massimo Cheiruzzi has done a great job with this article. I like to talk about my personal experience if I may. I’ve been using video retargeting messaging via email for quite some time. The company that I decided to use – after several wrong choices – was Treepodia. Thankfully, these guys got the job done right and I now see higher return on investment, greater retention, and more user engagement. I totally agree that you have to prioritize your buyers (known customers) because they’ve already made purchases through your company. You can only go from strength to strength this way.
Is there any size limit for custom audiences?
First off I would like to say terrific blog! I had a quick question that I’d like to ask if you do not mind.
I was curious to find out how you center yourself and clear your thoughts before writing.
I have had difficulty clearing my thoughts in
getting my thoughts out. I do enjoy writing however it just seems like the first 10 to 15
minutes tend to be lost just trying to figure out how to
begin. Any recommendations or tips? Thanks!
Hi Bilal, there are a lot of techniques to write a post. I can suggest you to write a mainframe first, include h2 kws, ltkw and so on, then follow it to expand your points! cheers
How to allow users to remove themselves from my custom audience?
I am an advertiser and i have created a custom audience. I want to allow users to opt out of my custom audience. This help page, https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1415256572060999, states “Advertisers can also choose to offer an opt-out for their Custom Audiences on Facebook. If the advertiser does offer an opt-out, you’ll see a link to the opt-out when you select Why am I seeing this?”
I want to know how I offer an opt-out and make this link show up with my ads so that customers can opt out of my custom audience.
This article is very useful, this is my first time connect to facebook ADs, thank you very much.
Hey guys – we at ROIHunter just published an exhausting article about Facebook Custom Audiences (with all current possibilities) that includes even a PDF with Data Mapping Formats (free download, no e-mail required). If you are looking for complete guide how to create Custom Audiences and what data do you need, you will find it here: https://www.roihunter.com/blog/ultimate-guide-custom-audiences
Have a great day and target them all! 🙂
Hello, I am someone who is navigating creating my first page boost or ad creation. I have had some instruction on how to create an ad if you have only recently created a website. In my case, I have no email list of contacts or any past customers to use for any of the sources that you listed to create a custom audience.
I believe one can simply start with generating the filters you want for an audience and then keep reflecting on the “audience insignts” tool to see how it can be refined to conform to what Facebook says your potential audience’s profile is.
However, you did not even mention creating a new audience from scratch in the entirety of your article. You have been very explicit in your teaching style, however for someone like myself who has no criteria to create a custom audience from any existing social media interactions, I must rely on matching my products benefits to the best match of interests and other demographic and other matching headings in the audience insights tool to learn my ideal customers world and even learn the websights who DO already have huge lists of fans and likes etc FROM which I can then include in my own audience by asking FB to use their customers as criteria to model my audience after. I would have like to have had you explain how that can be done, for people like myself who are brand new to internet marketing and FB, who do or will not have any of the existing resources that you covered to borrow from to create a new custom audience from.
In other words, if a person has to start from scratch to build an audience, please lay out the options to create that with no prior contacts to work with. I hope you understand what I am trying to say, and maybe you have already created an instructional approach to do exactly what I am asking, but I am just not familiar with where you might have it available. Thanks. Tim
Also, I wanted to ask you, if you recommend a “hard” landing page? “Hard” as in a landing page that requires a first name and an email to proceed further to my website for someone who desires my service or product. Or do you advise a “soft” landing page, that simply has a pop-up screen-over that encourages them to give you their contact name and email, but which they can just click away by hitting an “x” to clear the screen, if they don’t wish to opt-in to your promotion or mailing list?
I’m currently using a “hard” landing page, because I was told that that is the only kind of landing page that reliably helps you build an email list. But recently I was told that a majority of people will just pass on my opportunity, if I require them to give me their email to gain access to my sales pages.
Facebook has since changed after this. Is there an updated post of the Facebook Ads Guide?
working on it 🙂
Your post helped me a lot,thanks for sharing it.
Hey, You have written a great article with lots of valuable information which are very useful to me! Very interesting and detailed exposition of current techniques!
Hi, I want to know should I create custom audience before running my ads or I can create after running my ads. Can I retarget add to cart my audience if I don’t create a custom audience before running my ads?
Your all articles are very valuable and informative, thx for this amazing and wonderful article.
What is the minimum budget you should set to Boost if you have 1000 list of audience data?
Thanks for sharing the important information about Facebook Ad Custom Audiences: Everything You Need To Know. Because now social media is on trend and Facebook is also a part of social media. So need to know all the information about that. In this article, you can cover all the point which are important for all the people who relate the marketing field. So are doing a good job keep it up and share all the updates on social media
if I am watching a Facebook live video posted by Facebook audience user and at the same time I am making a video call, can the owner of posted video live see us or hear us?
When creating your CSV file to creating a custom audience, what is an appropriate amount of email addresses to have? 10? 50? 100? 1000?
The Facebook template has 10. Is this best practice?
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Hi! Very nice and thorough guide!
I don’t understand something though!
When you say:
“In short: keep your custom audiences always updated!”
How do you do it in practice. When I create a custom audience with all my email subscribers from CRM system, how can I update the audience in, lets say, one month, when my list has grown. I don’t see any button like “update audience” when I click or selected the audience in the “Audiences Settings” in the Business manager.
I kind of double it that facebook does it automatically?
How about audience created based on website visitors?
If I create an audience of all my website visitors in the past 180 days, will facebook update it automatically over time?
Cheers and thank you!
Can you tell us more about this? I’d like to find out some additional information.
Thanks for the helpful post.
Is the purpose of uploading contacts into Ads Manager to create an ad that costs money? Are there any other benefits to uploading contacts into Ads Manager? Thanks!
Did you ever find a resolution to this? Keeps happening to me as well.
i keep on getting this error when trying to create a custom audience, but i am the only admin on the account..
(#2654) No Write Permission to This Ad Account: User must have write permission to create audience under this ad account
Live streaming is the latest fad on social media so make sure to get live with your audience from time to time.
Live streaming would give you a more intimate space with your viewers and encourage them to interact with you more often. It would allow more personal interaction with your audience in real time.
You can also share your live videos later, so that those who have missed out the live streaming can view them again. A tour of your business, a demonstration of your products or an interview with the creators are some of the possible content which can be created with a live video.
Make sure to make the most out of the apps which allows you to go live directly from the blog.
2019 update ???
Working on it! Thanks for the heads up 🙂
Great post! Looking forward to the new 2019 update. My facebook page has grown by a couple hundred users since the last time I build a lookalike audience. Do I ever need to rebuild the audience or does it constantly update based on my likes?