Chapter 4: Audiences
While targeting for conversion campaigns are heavily assisted by Meta’s Advantage+ AI, there’s still loads of benefit to be reaped from using Meta’s most advantageous advertising feature: Custom and Lookalike Audiences. Navigate to the left-most menu on the screen and click on “Audiences” - this is where the magic happens.
Custom Audience: Custom audiences allow us to leverage pixel data to segment out specific audiences based on the tracked events from the Meta pixel. If you click “Create a custom audience” you will see all of the different data sources we have access to for creating custom audiences. Some of the most useful of these will be Website Data, Customer Lists, Instagram Account & Facebook Pages, and sometimes Videos. Clicking on “Website” brings us to a page where we can segment any of the events tracked by the pixel on the website. This includes things like Purchase, Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout, etc. We can also segment out people who have visited specific website pages, or build segments of people based on how much time they have spent browsing our website. We also have the option to decide how far back we are going to scrape our data in order to segment out this audience. You want to make sure you set this time duration to be long enough that you have enough people in the audience so it’s meaningful, without going too far back that it becomes unmeaningful. A sweet spot is generally 3-6 months, but if you have high traffic, 30 days works too. You also have the option to include or exclude additional segments of users. An example of this would be creating a custom audience of website visitors that didn’t purchase anything - you would create the audience of website visitors, then select “Exclude people”, and set it to people that purchased something.
Use Cases: Custom audiences can be great for directly retargeting people who have interacted with your brand in the past. You can segment out groups of people that maybe visited your website and never bought anything, or people that have interacted with your social media but never visited your website (More on retargeting later). You can also use custom audiences as exclusion audiences in your ad sets, allowing you to for example, exclude people who purchased from you already from your ads, ensuring your ads are only going to people who haven’t yet purchased.