Let's talk about remarketing to an audience of people who already know, like, and/or trust you. You may want to do this if you have a new offer to share with your existing audience, or if you want to offer an alternative ad to an audience of people who did not opt in for something on the first attempt. You can also use these audiences to exclude people from seeing your ads if they've already completed the desired action – which will improve the performance of your ads.
Once you are in Ads Manager you will want to navigate to the audiences dashboard by clicking the menu (the 3 horizontal lines in the upper left hand corner) and then clicking on AUDIENCES. From here, you can click the button to create a new audience – then select custom audience – to see all the options:
Let's start at the bottom and talk about the audiences from Facebook Sources:
- Facebook Page – Page Fans OR People who have engaged (any type of engagement: likes, comments, shares, clicks, etc.)
- Instagram Business Profile – you MUST have a Business profile on Instagram for this to work – and I want to mention that there is no reason not to switch your personal profile over to a business profile. Instagram is different from Facebook, and there are no penalties for business accounts on the Instagram platform.
- Events – if you are promoting events on Facebook you can create an audience of people who said they were going or interested in going to an event.
- Instant Experience – formally known as “Canvas” – you can create an audience of people who have clicked into and engaged with Instant Experiences
- Lead Forms – you can create audiences of people who have opened and/or submitted the form. I love that you can remarket to the people who opened the form but did not submit it!
- Videos – this is the least expensive way to build a warm audience! Video consumption is very popular on Facebook & Instagram and Facebook is able to capture people who watch videos into a custom audience.
- You can create an audience of people who have watched for: 3 seconds, 10 seconds, or people who have watched 25%, 50%, 75%, 95%, or 100% of your video.
- The higher the watch time, the smaller your audience will be.
- Most of my clients are getting 3 second video views for $0.01 and all of my clients are under $0.05! So, very inexpensive.
- I love that this is a way to warm up an audience without a huge investment! Not all of my clients need this – but it's worth testing to see if it will help your costs go down.
- If you don't have video creative, consider going Live!
Then, there are sources that you own:
- Website Traffic – this requires the Pixel, so if you don't have the Pixel installed, you'll want to get started with that, HERE!
- You can target your website as a whole: all web traffic
- You can also target specific pages – this will allow you to create an audience of people who have visited the “thank you” page, indicating that they took action with you (either joining your list, or buying a product) and now you can strategically exclude those people from seeing your ads. This will improve relevance and decrease wasted costs.
- Customer Files – you can update your email list to Facebook and they'll match those emails to Facebook profiles, so that you can remarket to them, or exclude them from seeing your ads.
- (the other 2 are not as commonly used among my audience, so I will save those for another day in an effort to keep this relevant)
Often, when I am using exclusionary targeting because I want to ensure people who took action are not in my targeted audiences, I will use a combination of Customer File audiences and Website Traffic audiences, because the website traffic audiences will update automatically, but only retain data for 180 days – so at least every 6 months you will need to manually update your customer files, then the website traffic audience will “fill in the gaps” until you update that list again. 6 months is the minimum, but I recommend updating your lists every 1-3 months, just to be safe.
Right now, this is what you should do:
Go into the Audiences dashboard and check out these options and start to think about the assets that you have and how you would leverage them for remarketing and exclusionary marketing, then begin to build out some of those audiences so that they are ready for you when you want them!