We all agree: Facebook Custom Audiences are one of – if not the most –essential tools for successful Facebook advertising campaigns.
There’s been a lot of changes to custom audiences since Facebook rolled them out in 2013, that’s why we created this 2019 update of our guide!
In this post, we will go through everything you need to know about Custom Audiences – from the setup to advanced implementation, to tactics.
Warning: it’s packed with tips, tutorials, and tactics, after reading this guide, you’ll have everything you need to know! But we won’t stop there!
Keep on reading and discover what we have in store for you!
First Bonus:
If you’re short on time or want this information offline, download the fully updated edition of our 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 Custom Audience
- How To Create an Engagement Custom Audience
- Using a Lookalike Audience
- Targeting Facebook Ads to Custom Audiences
- 3 Ways To Boost Your Campaigns with Custom Audiences
- Organizing Your Custom Audiences
- Custom Audiences Rules & Legality
If you’re new to this, make sure you read from the beginning! If you have any questions about a section, leave a comment!
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After you finish reading this guide and download your free eBook, you’ll probably want to check first-hand how all of this knowledge can be used in real life to boost your ROI and reduce your ad spend.
We created this FREE webinar just for you!
In this one-hour class, Paul Fairbrother, AdEspresso’s Head of Education, will show you all the ins and outs of campaign targeting. You’ll learn how to effectively use all kinds of audiences so you can avoid wasted ad spend and too high CPA’s!
It’s free, just click here on on the picture above to reserve your seat and/or get your own copy of the recording of the webinar.
How to Create a Facebook Custom Audience
To create your first Custom Audience, go to the Business Manager menu in the top lefthand corner and select “Audiences” from the Assets section:
From there, select the “Create Audience” blue button:
A dropdown menu will ask you which audience type you would like to create, select “Custom Audience”:
You’ll then be presented with 10 different options for the audience source:
Go Back To the Table of Contents
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 60-70% 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 or game. If your business has an app associated with it, you need to be utilizing custom audiences on Facebook. - Offline Activity
Conversions that happen offline, such as in a store, can be logged and then listed on a spreadsheet which is then uploaded to Facebook. - Facebook Sources – Engagement Custom Audiences
You can create audiences of those who engage with your posts, videos, events and forms on Facebook and Instagram. The duration of these audience types is up to 365 days (apart from for lead forms which is 90 days), although the more recent is often better.
We’ll go through how to create each one of these audiences one-by-one, and then follow up with some tactics on how you can utilize them.
Go Back To the Table of Contents
How To Create a Customer List Custom Audience
Let’s select the “Customer File” option. This is where you can upload your leads – or potential customers.
You’ll have two options to sync your customer lists:
- Manually upload your audience in a .txt or .csv file.
- Synchronization with your Email CRM to your Facebook Ads Account
1 – Manual Upload
You’ll be presented with three options:
The first two options require a .csv or .txt file, and if you have an eCommerce store often you can export an extra column for the customer lifetime value data. The third option obviously requires a MailChimp account to sync with.
There are up to 15 identifiers you can include in the upload such as name, city, and age along with the email address:
The more information you can include, the more accurate the matching will be by Facebook.
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!).
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How To Create a Website Custom Audience
What do you do if you don’t have a big enough database of emails 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.
Discover everything you need to know about pixel setup and installation in our guide here.
Website Custom Audience Options
The default is “all website visitors” but clicking on the dropdown menu gives a range of options:
- People who visited specific web pages: this allows you to filter based on URLs, either including or excluding certain keywords or the entire URL string.
- Visitors by time spent: select the top 5%, 10% or 25% of website visitors based on time spent on site
- From your events: pick a pixel event to build an audience from. For instance, use the purchase event to build a list of recent customers.
Advanced options can then be chosen to further refine the audiences:
- Frequency: how many times a website visitor performs an action, such as visiting a page or purchasing.
- Dynamic date: allows you to target visitors who have visited within a certain time period.
- Devices: Android, iOS, desktop, and all mobile devices can be included or excluded.
- Aggregated value: this includes various options but is most commonly used to filter by the amount spent, for example to only include those that spent $100 or more:
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!
Go Back To the Table of Contents
How To Create an App Activity Custom Audience
With mobile accounting for over 90% of Facebook ads served, it only makes sense that creating audiences based on app activity is 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. Target them with a discount coupon and voila!
There’s a wide range of actions you can currently target, but the most popular are:
- Anyone who opened the app
- Top 5%, 10% or 25% most active users
- Top 5%, 10% or 25% by purchase amount
- Users by segment, with the segment being created in Facebook Analytics
Go Back To the Table of Contents
How To Create an Engagement Custom Audience
These six types of engagement custom audiences really open up the doors for new businesses or those that are too small to have built up email lists or large volumes of website traffic.
Let’s look at each option in more detail:
-
Video:
Select one or more videos, the time window to include and then the percentage or time watched.
-
Instagram:
Select the Instagram profile and then choose from the various engagement options available.
-
Lead form:
Either choose a specific lead form or the account as a whole, then anyone who opened the form, or specifically those that did or didn’t submit it.
-
Events:
Select a specific event or the account as a whole then choose from a wide range of options, including ticket sales if you have connected Eventbrite.
-
Instant Experience:
this was previously called Canvas, and just like for events or leads you can choose a specific post or the whole account. Then, choose those who opened or clicked on the Experience.
-
Facebook Page:
this is similar to Instagram, choose the relevant business page and then pick from the range of engagement options.
Go Back To the Table of Contents
Using a Lookalike Audience
While custom audiences are great for re-engaging people who already had an interaction with you, lookalike audiences allow you to target new users that don’t know you yet, but are very likely to become your customers.
Choose a suitable custom audience as a source, for example, current customers if the aim is to get more purchasers, or current leads if you wish to get more signups.
For more advice, check out our complete guide to Facebook lookalike audiences.
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Targeting Your Facebook Ads To a Custom Audience
Targeting audiences is extremely simple.
Start with opening Facebook Ads Manager and creating a new adset within a campaign. Scroll down to the Audiences section:
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.
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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 give you a few examples and then it’s down to you to test and experiment.
1) Guide People Through Your Sales Funnel
An AdEspresso subscription is only going to appeal to a subset of digital marketers and only a small fraction of the general population. So, we boost more general blog posts to cold traffic and can then build a 5 day audience of website visitors and advertise a free trial to them. As they’re already aware of AdEspresso, the conversion rate is much higher than promoting trials to cold traffic. Current and previous customers are excluded from these campaigns using login data based on the pixel being installed on the AdEspresso login page and also custom audiences based on email lists of current and churned customers, updated using Data Sync.
2) Turn Video Views Into Sales
A video is often the best way of introducing your brand to new prospects, but it’s also very difficult to get across a brand awareness message and a sales call to action at the same time. By building a video view custom audience, it’s possible to create a very simple two-step sales funnel.
For example, Hootsuite promotes videos with case studies, such as this one featuring Accor Hotels:
The Facebook viewers that watched the video can then be targeted with a free trial offer.
3) Upsell to existing customers
It’s easier to sell to someone who has already bought from you than to a total stranger. Yet, it’s surprising how often brands think the sales funnel stops once the first purchase is made. Often, they’ll exclude their current customer custom audience from ad campaigns instead of thinking how they can leverage this audience.
Here’s an example of how upselling should be done, with this subscription box offering monthly subscribers a strong incentive to upgrade to a yearly plan.
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Organizing Your Custom Audiences
Within the Audiences section in Business Manager, you’ll see a lefthand column, allowing you to search for an audience or view recent ones, active ones and those shared to and from the account.
Taking things to the next level, within AdEspresso’s Asset Manager you can create folders to separate the audiences, for example relating to a certain promotion or by the name of the person that created them.
This is especially useful for agencies to keep track of all their audiences across multiple ad accounts.
Go Back To the Table of Contents
Final Word on Custom Audiences 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.
-
#1) You can only create custom audiences with data you have received permission to use.
Explaining how you will use the data collected should be included within your site’s Privacy Policy, but that’s only the first step and you should be compliant with GDPR regulations even if only some of your website traffic comes from Europe. Just to be even more clear: you can’t use data scraped on public websites or on Facebook. Yes, no Facebook scraping!
-
#2) 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!
Wrapping it Up
Facebook Ads Custom audiences are a very powerful tool to increase your sales at a very competitive price.
With well over 2 billion users on Facebook and over a billion on Instagram, it’s important to know how to target just the right people so that you maximize your results and avoid wasted ad spend.
As always, our suggestion to get the most out of your marketing budget is to always split test your Facebook Ads … with AdEspresso of course!
But having some Pro tips from one of the best facebook Ads experts can be the cherry on top of your ROAS cake! Click the image below to get the whole cake (and eat it too) 😉 😎
Click to attend or to get the recording of: The Facebook Ads Targeting Blueprint with Paul Fairbrother
I’m sure you can find many other creative ways to get the most out of Facebook Custom Audiences, please share your ideas in the comments!
And don’t forget to get your copy of our updated free ebook:
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?
Thank you so much for this step by step guide on the custom audience in facebook marketing. I always wished to promote my blog guides through facebook custom audience. But I think custom audience works better when we have a large audience size rather than a smaller one.
My favorite is Website Custom Audiences because Instead of users’ email addresses or phone numbers, you can insert a Facebook Pixel tracking code on your website and target your Facebook Advertising. Thanks for sharing.
This seems like a great deal of effort. I’m concerned about the risk reward, do you have a guide or tips to recommend whether custom audiences will be a fruitful endeavor? (such as size of business, industry, etc)