Facebook has and continues to launch features designed to provide direct response marketers with broader solutions to reach people across all devices. In addition to this, they’ll also encourage them to take action through Facebook remarketing and various other options available to target audiences. More marketers can now build Custom Audiences based upon the actions people take whilst visiting their site or mobile app, and then deliver ads based on these actions.
Custom Audiences from a website, or mobile app, combine Facebook’s existing Custom Audiences capabilities, namely: scale, real identity across devices and accurate targeting with real-time automated audience creation. You can now reach potential customers in the most conspicuous location on Facebook, the News Feed. You can imagine how powerful this is to bring users back and increase your conversions. All this on Facebook! Initial reports from Facebook reveal these ads get a 20 – 40x higher CTR than standard FBX ads.
More ways to reach your website and mobile app visitors
Thanks to this feature, each time you create a Page Post Ad in which the objective is to drive traffic to the campaign’s desktop, or mobile website landing page, a Call-To-Action (CTA) button can be added in the post. This, by default, is in the lower right hand corner of the ad. The 5 Call-To-Action buttons are:
- Shop Now
- Learn More
- Sign Up
- Book Now
- Download
Another bit of exciting news is that these CTA’s aren’t just for ads. They can be used for organic posts as well. At the time of this writing, it was not even a test feature that’s only available to the biggest of brands – everyone is likely have access to Call-To-Action buttons! The new Custom Audiences feature will allow advertisers to track a user’s behaviour through a third-party app, or website, and based on these interactions, advertisers will be able to customise the ads viewers see the next time they look at their Facebook Timeline. Conclusion: This will help marketers reach people across all devices and encourage them to take action.
How?
By placing the Facebook remarketing pixel on your website, Facebook page, or third-party SDK on your mobile app. Examples:
- Retail Industry: By installing the Facebook or third-party SDK in the respective retail company’s mobile app, retargeting campaigns can be built. These campaigns can then target people on mobile or desktop, encouraging them to come back to their site and, for instance, purchase the items previously left in their shopping cart.
- Travel Industry: With the remarketing pixel, a travel company could use Custom Audiences to reach different groups of people that did not convert, for example, browsers who searched for car rentals but didn’t make a final selection while preparing for their vacation – through a targeted message in News Feed such as: “Visit us again at X Rentals for a 15% discount on your next car rental booking.”
- Zaggora, a women’s active wear company, used Custom Audiences from its website, which resulted in a 3-6x return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Seeking Alpha, a leading financial news application, average cost per install was reduced by 28% when targeting mobile app install ads to people who had previously visited their site
- JackThreads, an online retailer for men, saw over 8X ROAS by reaching people from their mobile app who added to their cart but did not purchase
- In another campaign, JackThreads achieved over 4X ROAS by targeting and re-engaging purchasers from the last 30 days, but not from the past day
How to set it up?
The Custom Audiences feature for websites and mobile apps is available through the Power Editor, Ads Manager, Facebook Ads Interface and Preferred Marketing Developers.
- Place the Facebook container pixel in the header or footer on your website (or mobile app) so that it will fire on each page view. (The pixel is going to be the same every time, so you only need to paste the pixel on your website once. You can then activate this feature with the first pixel. All future audiences will be created to customize your audience.)
- Leverage the events to pass additional data (i.e. product, geo, value, etc.). Piggybacking on top of another pixel is supported, however, direct placement provides better performance.
- You can create up to 200 Website Custom Audiences.
Privacy Issues/ concerns
In a separate blog post, Facebook defended the privacy implications for users of the new advertising feature.
Let’s say you shopped for shoes on a shoe store’s website. Through this new feature, the shoe store can then show you the ad the next time you’re on Facebook. But we won’t tell the store who you are – and we don’t need to receive any of your personal information from the advertiser to make this work. This tool works without exchanging your personal information. This means that advertisers don’t need to collect your personal information or share it with us in order to show you ads. Facebook creates a list of people who should see a particular company’s ad campaigns. But we don’t make that list available to other companies, and we don’t use the information we receive through this program to build profiles of your interests or other activity.
Facebook also says it will give users a way to opt out of the new feature if they wish.
Conclusion
This feature now allows yet another way to reach a remarkably relevant audience, as well as being able to target fans organically! Custom Audiences allows you to reach targeted individuals who may be Facebook fans. It can even help you reach offline customers, so long as they’ve visited your website, through your email database. The system enables you to be even more precise if that’s what you need. By singling out potential customers who visited specific pages you’re able to lead a targeted campaign by topic, product or simply by keyword. By narrowing your search to this degree you’re likely to save a large percentage on your spend while attracting exactly the market you want. You don’t have to be a marketer, to realise and appreciate that the customization potential for these ads is phenomenal!
