The ULTIMATE Facebook Custom Audience Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hi guys it's ben heath from lead guru and in this video i'm going to show you exactly how to create facebook custom audiences i want this to be the ultimate custom audience tutorial i'm going to show you how to create them i'm going to show you how to target them how you actually retarget using custom audiences i'm going to rank them for you so you know exactly which ones you want to be using which ones you want to be using first which ones you don't want to be using at all so if you've got questions and you want to be using custom audiences as part of facebook advertising which you absolutely should be if you're advertising on facebook you absolutely should be able to customer audiences then i think you're going to find this video really really useful before i get into that should i very quickly ask you to smash that like button and of course subscribe to my channel if you're new and haven't done so already okay so let's get let's get into it i'm an example facebook ad account here i'm i'm an ad manager so you're probably very familiar with this view to create custom audiences you want to go ahead and jump over to the audiences tab so if you look on these three little lines i've got it up here in shortcuts which you probably will have it otherwise you can just scroll down and find it on the left hand side but you want to go ahead and jump into audiences now this is an example ad account i create demonstration practice type stuff all the time so there's all sorts of things in here don't worry about that you don't need to to think about that for now we're going to go through this and to create custom audiences you want to go ahead and click on this create audience button and then click on custom audience now with this window up i just want to very quickly explain exactly what a custom audience is so a custom audience refers to a group of people that have already interacted with your business previously and advertise creating custom audiences which you need to do to advertise to them and then advertising to them through a retargeting campaigns what retargeting as you refer to you're usually targeting a custom audience and it's absolutely essential to producing the best facebook advertising results because people that have already interacted with your business before whether that's as we're going to get into these examples in a minute whether that's someone who's visited your website or someone that's on your email list or someone that's just watched a video of yours on facebook that person is far more likely to convert far more likely to buy your products or services than a cold audience so for every single sales funnel that we put together for our clients we are creating facebook ads custom audiences and including them um in our retargeting ad sets our retargeting campaigns okay so that's what custom audiences are right we're going to run through some of the examples here now so you can see at the top we've got your sources and we've got facebook sources often referred to as off app versus in-app sources so what i'd encourage you to do is start with the your sources the sources of custom audiences that you have that are external to facebook and instagram usually contain people that are higher quality so as an example someone who has visited your website is probably more interested in your business more likely to buy your products and services than someone who has just watched 10 seconds of video of yours on facebook there's there's a higher level of interaction there they've demonstrated more commitment more interest in what it is that that you are as a business what is your advertising so that's why you want to start with the your sources and the absolute best custom audience to advertise to the best one to start with is a customer list so we're going to click on customer list and then i select next now i'm not going to walk through this exact process because um that would obviously demonstrate you know people on my email list data and things like that so i can't go through that process but it's very straightforward you can just click through these various options um and upload stuff um here but people on your customer list people who've already bought from you previously that is the highest level of intent you can possibly get so that is absolutely the first audience custom audience that you want to create and absolutely one you want to be advertising to assuming of course that you don't just sell the one product and it's not just a one-time purchase okay so if you just sell the one product and it's a one-time purchase then yeah no point creating a custom audience of your previous customers and advertise to those people but if you have repeat purchases or if you have um a number range of different products whereas people might have bought one thing and they can be sold other stuff absolutely want to be retargeting these people and i think it's a bit of a myth that people uh advertisers often don't want to retarget people who've bought from them before with their other products or to get them to buy it again if it's like a subscription or a product or a consumer product because they're concerned or they think it's a waste of money because those people can come back and buy anyway nonsense people forget they have busy lives you need to be reminding them even if they bought from you previously so actually go ahead and create a customer list custom audience to upload so that's that's tier one is a customer list people have bought from you previously and you may have that in mailchimp which you can import directly as you can see here or you can just download a file template or sorry you can just upload a file you can download a fireplace template to help you out with that but you can just upload a file like um an excel document that's got the data name one column email list another c email address another column whatever the information you have you can see that you've got these main identifiers is what facebook uses to match people um email is going to be the best option if you've got email addresses in there um and names fantastic upload it add the uh the information job done very simply straightforward okay i'm gonna close that down uh oh i always click back actually so great audience custom audience so the best one is customer list just beneath the customer list in terms of the results that you're going to get when you retarget these people is an email list and i like to think of these as separate things i know a lot of people have it bundled all in one go but in my mind we have our customer list so people on our email list that have bought from us previously and then we have our email list which contains people who have subscribed for whatever reason but they haven't gone on to board again not every business is going to have these some will have one some won't have the other absolutely fine if you don't have either of these not a problem we're going to get on to stuff that everyone has or will have as soon as they start advertising and next one is your email list again if someone's joined your email list that is a very high level of intent they should they're really interested in your products or services otherwise they wouldn't have interest subscribe in the first place and then that is absolutely a custom audience you want to create and you do it exactly the same way so you click on customer list and you just upload it whether it's imported for mailchimp or separate csv or txt file super simple job done okay after that in in the in the tiers of the best facebook ads custom audiences is website activity so if you go to your sources you want to click on website now in order to be able to create custom audiences based on people who visit your website so this is so that you can anyone visit your website you can put them into custom audience and then you can then retarget these people and by the way this is a quick point to mention because facebook popped up here i am going to talk about how ios 14 affects custom audiences and the changes that we're making now post ios 14 as opposed to what we did previously i will get to that so don't worry about that okay so um in order to to to create a website custom audience and then be able to re-target these people you need to have the facebook pixel installed on your website so i'll include a link beneath this video uh in the description to another video that shows you exactly how to install the pixel how to verify your domain all the stuff you need to do with the pixel in 2021 okay now the first website custom audience that i would recommend you create obviously once you've got the pixels set up is all website visitors it says anyone that visits your website and i would extend you can see the retention default is 30 days but the maximum is 180 days and i would go with 180 days now people often want to go with shorter custom audiences so people who visited more recently here's why that's not really necessary facebook knows so facebook knows if someone visited five days ago versus if they visited 50 days ago and they are absolutely gonna advertise to people that visited five days ago first and then they will get to the people that visited 50 days ago by increasing this retention this time period you are only increasing your potential audience and look someone has visited your website 90 days ago is still much better to advertise to than someone that's never heard of you never visit your website anything like that hopefully that sounds kind of obvious it could i do that all the time i research a certain product or perhaps i'm thinking of taking a holiday or something like that and i don't look at it for months and months and months and i go yeah okay yeah i'm going to go ahead and get that done now and often it will be an ad that will remind you that will pop up and you go ah yes i have the meaning to get that booked or i have a meaning to buy one of those let's go ahead and get that taken care of now okay so um so i encourage you to get all website listed 180 days and then you very simply want to give this audience a name so i would normally go with something like all website visitors 180. super simple description completely up to you you just want to name give your custom audience a name that you're going to recognize when you've got tons in your ad account and you go uh what's that so that's what i start with and you go ahead and click create audience boom done now once once you've gotten familiar with your website listeners perhaps you've used it a few times or if you've got tons and tons of website traffic and you want to start being more specific then you can click on this option this event option down here and you can come with some of the options so you could for example go from your event so anyone that's clicked add to cart you know that's triggered the add to cart event assuming again that's set up correctly on your website you might want to specifically retarget them we retarget them with um catalog sell with campaigns for example all the time more information on that to follow um so you can start to get more specific depending on how your events set up that may or may not be a good option for example if you've got a website that is looking to generate leads and perhaps you want to retarget the people that have become leads with an ad that helps them convert because perhaps you're calling them and you're emailing them when you're trying to get them to take the next step and hire you for your services but a retargeting ad would say a client testimonial might be a good thing to throw in there as well so you could create it based on people who've become a lead on your website you can also do things like people who listed specific pages so if you had a specific page on your website so for example let's say i as my business my my company lead guru we offer done for you facebook advertising services we also sell facebook advertising related courses right so let's say i wanted to come in and do something like uh leave go to code uk slash done for you which is the if i spell it correctly that's the main page where you're going to find information about our done-for-you services right so i could go ahead and be aware of this url contains url equals if i put it all in like that then i'd want to equals if i had for example a whole bunch of pages about services i could do url contains and just take services but perhaps i want to create this type of custom audience because i only want to i have a specific type of ad i want to run for are done for you services so i only want that to be sent to people that have visited that page the done for you page whereas perhaps i have a course called facebook ads insiders perhaps i wanted to send a user to create an ad and put it in front of people who visited the sales page for facebook ads insiders um because i want to help convince them to purchase it again it could be with like someone who's bought it before testimonial or it could be with more information about what's included in the course or reminding people that there's a 14 money back guarant 14 day money back guarantee that sort of thing so you can start to get more specific for your marketing needs and this will really depend on your business i said just about everyone should start with all web services and then you can start to get more specific you can also start to add in exclusions okay so i can click on for example exclude people so i want to target i want to create a custom audience out of everyone who's visited my facebook ads insider's page on my website right but perhaps i don't want to also be advertising to people that have purchased it so um let's say let's go ahead and add in people to visit webpages let's change the retention to be the same thing so we've got 180 days up here 180 days down there and then if the if the um url contains thank you so they've reached one of my thank you pages and that's a good way of using contains actually it's a good example because obviously we sell a bunch of different things there might be different pages on there if the url contains thank you or i could put in a specific one for facebook ads insiders then i want them excluded okay now what this will do is it will advertise to people that have visited my facebook ads insiders page so they've checked out the information but they haven't bought it it's gonna exclude the people that have bought it and there are obvious reasons why you would want to do something like that okay so again think about how this would work through your business now this audience for example could be um facebook ads insiders visitors um 180 and then i put something in here like excluding purchases okay and you can start to see how there are just tons of different options when it comes to website customer audiences here right tons and tons of tons of different options you could have people that do certain things but not they've done a but not b c and d they've done um b but not c and d all sorts of different stuff right now what i would do for exclusions when it comes to website custom audiences is we would often just create the one layer and we wouldn't exclude at the custom audience level what we'd actually do is we create one custom audience for example of people who visited the facebook ads insiders page and then we create a separate custom audience of people who've purchased the facebook ads inside of course and then we would um add those both in at the ad set level which i'm going to show you how to do in a minute so that way it just gives you more flexibility this is just the one audience you can't have one or not the other and all that sort of stuff but you can create something like this as well so that we can go ahead and click create audience boom and that's done don't have to worry about this stuff um and we'll talk about lookalikes in a little bit so let's go back in to custom audiences so we talked about customer list and email list then website related custom audiences which are the next tier now i would say that every single advertiser wants to be advertising to customer list email list and website listeners okay that's a no-brainer again of course assuming you have them you might be watching this going but i don't have a customer list i don't have an email list that's absolutely fine if you're telling me you don't have website visitors that's only because you either haven't got the pixel installed or you haven't started advertising yet as soon as you start advertising and sending people to your website you will be generating website visitors unless of course you're using one of the other campaign objectives like lead generation which we're going to talk about in a minute but the vast vast majority of people watching this are going to have website visitors already or about to be generating them once they start running and facebook ad campaigns right now i think now is a perfect opportunity to talk about ios 14.5 and the effect it's had on website custom audiences because ios 14.5 has had a big impact on website custom audiences and app activity custom audiences you will see that we get the warning there but for example if i go back and i click on video and click next no warning on that type of uh custom audience right because iowa's 40.5 restricts facebook's ability to track what people do once they leave facebook these are all down here are facebook sources and and and therefore they're not affected by the ios 14.5 update in as much as you know everything to do with facebook advertising is a little bit affected because facebook have changed some stuff but not directly impacted like you can still track people to watch your videos no problem however with the website click next again with the website custom audiences if someone is using an ios 14.5 or later um setup device and they don't opt into tracking there's a very good chance that they will not be included in your custom audience and that's annoying that sucks that reduces the size of your custom audience which as we know a website custom audience is fantastic you absolutely want to be advertising them to them and that being reduced in size is annoying it's not something any of us want nothing you could do about it if that's the case well that is the case and with that being the case what we need to do is add in some other types of custom audiences in order to try and make up for the loss of audience size now typically i used to recommend that you advertise to customer list email list website visitors and that more or less be all the custom audiences that you retarget with your facebook ad campaigns pre-rs 14.5 now i'm recommending that you add in some of the facebook sources i think that's now become a lot more important because we have lost some data with the website custom audience lot post os 14.5 so as i said there's no way around that there's no quick fix um we've lost some data this is the best way to go about getting it back because if someone's on ios 14 device and let's say they watch a video of yours and then click on the website you can't track what they do on your website very well but you can absolutely track the fact that they watched a video of yours okay which leads us nicely onto facebook sources because that's where the next step is i'm not going to talk about app activity or offline activity by the way i'm going to be creating separate videos about those topics because they're like whole separate things i'm going to be focusing here on what 98 of all the people plus of all the people watching my videos are going to be using um so there's gonna be a few down here that i don't focus on either the next one is video so this is on facebook sources and when you talk about facebook we are talking about both facebook and instagram and with this type of custom audience you can retarget you can create a custom audience have anyone that has watched a video of yours on facebook or instagram a fantastic audience to retarget particularly after the ios 14.5 so the way it works is you want to come in and select engagement here and you choose a content type so if i click on this little drop down we can see that there are certain criteria that need to be met kind of like the all website visitors versus people that visit specific pages and you can go with anyone who's viewed at least three seconds of your video so depending on the length of your video hardly anything and that's going to lead to your largest video viewer custom audience okay if you're just getting started you have very very small custom audiences it's absolutely fine to go with something like people who read at least three seconds if you're starting to get much larger numbers of video viewers and say in the tens of thousands especially in the hundreds of thousands i'd look to be a little bit more discerning and go with something like people who have watched at least 25 of your video there's always a trade-off with custom audiences between how interested someone is their intent their likeliness to buy and the higher percentage of your video watch the more interest they are the more like they are to buy when you advertise to them so that's on one side of the other column let's say and then on the other side the counter balancing force is how large the audience is now we know that facebook ad campaigns perform better with larger audiences so that's your trade-off okay there's going to be far less people that watch 25 your video versus three seconds but these people are going to be better quality so that's why as you start to generate more video viewers you want to be more discerning and go with a higher percentage it's also why when i gave the website visitor example when you're getting started go with all website visitors and then as you start to generate more and more website lists that's when you perhaps want to be more specific and go with specific pages and things along those lines so i'm going to go with 25 your video because i think that's a really good place to already have it selected a really good place to start then you want to go ahead and choose the videos so you can be specific around which videos people watch in order to be included so click on this i've got a bunch more videos again short ones i get more views on instagram which doesn't surprise me as is expected but i can go ahead and select you know a whole bunch here and they get added on the on this side i go ahead and click confirm and then people who watch these 25 fantastic fairly straightforward okay um i would normally go with basically as many videos as you've got or can add or at least as many videos as you've got around a certain topic so for example again if i wanted to create um a an ad campaign that was retargeting people that are interested in our services i might select all the videos about our services versus all the videos about our courses or my content is not really about our services like that it might be more like i might create a custom audience out of anyone that's watched a video of mine that's to do with um facebook ads targeting and then so i can select all the targeting related videos and then i might do the same but instead of it being targeting do it with ad creative select all the videos about ad creative you see how you could make that work for your business retention facebook defaults for 365 days which is the maximum fantastic that's what we want why would we want to make it any smaller so then i would just have give this a name like um video viewers 25 365 and then i might have targeting to let me know that these are all those aren't i've just grabbed a bunch but let me know that those are targeting related videos so that's a video of your custom audience now that is absolutely something i would recommend that you create and that you add in provided you are using videos across facebook and instagram as part of your marketing efforts i think post ios 14 is definitely worth doing first one was video next one i'll talk about is lead form because this is something that um [Music] you may or may not be using depending on your business if you're not using lead generation campaigns so that's a campaign where instead of someone clicking through to your website they click on the ad and they're presented with the form within facebook or instagram they then fill out their information send it to you become a lead boom you can follow up with them try and convert them into a customer i've got i've got video tutorial all about lead generation campaigns i'll include a link in the video description in case you want to check that out um so you can create custom audience out of people that interacted with your lead forms which if you're running lead generation campaigns is absolutely something you want to do if not you can ignore this section so if i go ahead and click on next and we are then presented with um with this sort of this window so the first thing just like with the others is to choose the event so do we want to retarget anyone that opened this form perhaps people that opened it but didn't submit it that could be a great option if someone opened the form but didn't actually submit their information they were interested they were thinking about it perhaps got distracted or perhaps weren't quite ready to go ahead now they are um or you can go with people who opened and submitted the form perhaps you want to retarget people that did submit the form but that but they haven't yet converted and again you want perhaps like a client testimonial in front of them to help push them over the line okay and so this would depending on what one you select would really depend on what it is your objective is here what is your advertising but we'll just go with anyone open this form for now then you obviously want to select your lead form i'm i'm doing i've got any created um because i haven't run a generation campaign on my page in a long time but so but you would just click on the drop down and select from whatever options you've got hopefully you've given them a name that you'll recognize if you've got a whole bunch of lead forms and then retention the maximum is 90 days which is interesting with lead forms so that's what i recommend you go with it's shorter i'm not exactly sure why but there we go and then you just want to give your audience a name just like we did before it won't let me create this because i don't have any lead forms set up and i'm going to go ahead and click back but that's leave forms very quickly okay so i'm going to skip over into experience shopping and i'm going to go to instagram account as i said i'm not going to focus on every single one in this uh tutorial i want this to be applicable to the 98 of of people who watch my videos and i'll create separate videos about the other stuff because um there's a lot more information involved but let's click on instagram account so let's go ahead and select next and in this custom audience we've got again a whole bunch of different options so um obviously make sure you've got the right account selected and then you want to go ahead and click on events now there are interesting options here so the first option the default is everyone who engaged with this professional account um and you can see that provide more information includes people who visited this profile or took an action on this post or ad such as likes comments save carousel swipes button taps or shares um this is going to be your largest custom audience when it's to do with your instagram account and if you're running campaigns on instagram as well which i know the majority of you will be it's what i'd usually recommend this is a great place to start if you're getting tons of engagement tons of interaction on instagram um then you may want to come and be more specific so for example you could go with anyone who visited professional accounts profile so they visit your profile people who engage with the poster ad so this will include you see the detail here took an action such as likes comments says carousel swipe buttons or shares this one's a little bit larger because it's all-inclusive of that and the other stuff you can do people who saved a poster ad as well that's going to be really very specific um but for the most part i'd recommend people go with everyone engaged retention the maximum is 365 days for the same reasons as outlined earlier we're going to go ahead and go with that and then i'm just going to give this a name like instagram engages 365. 265.365. super simple easy uh audience to create a great one definitely one i look to now include in your facebook ad campaign so the majority of advertisers let's bring up the window again are going to want to be creating custom audience out of customer list email list and website visitors you may or may not have those in which case that's absolutely fine but those three then if you are advertising videos definitely videos if you are using lead generation forms definitely lead forms you may or may not be using those if you're advertising on instagram which will be almost all of you then you want to be creating the instagram um instagram engages custom audience i'm going to skip over events for the same reasons outlined previously and then the last one that you want to be including in is a custom audience from people that have engaged with your facebook page so you want to make sure obviously you've got the right page selected and then if we click into um the events section you can see that the default is everyone who engaged with your page and facebook again provide more information you'll see that these options are somewhat similar to the instagram engages custom audience but here we've got um everyone engaged with your page includes people who have visited your page or taken an action on a post or ad such as reactions shares comments link clicks and carousel swipes so that's the the default and that includes the options um beneath it like anyone visits your page people engage with post or ad people who click the call to action button you can also now create a custom audience where it says here people who currently like or follow your page and you can see um as of the recording of this video this is quite a new feature you can see it pop up up here a new way to reach people who currently like or follow your page and it really you know it depends on whether you've run like facebook page like campaigns in the past to get lots of likes whether you want to use this option or not it's not where i would start with most facebook advertising not something i say the most facebook advertisers absolutely want to use but i do think you absolutely want to be including this one everyone engaged with your page just in the same way that we created the instagram engages custom audience to me this one's a no-brainer as well to include include the facebook page engages custom audience again retention 365 and we go with facebook page engages 365 create audience okay so um before i get into adding this into an ad set and how we would therefore make it look and how it how we would structure it i want to quickly talk about look-alike audiences look-alike audiences are something that you create off of custom audiences so let's say you take a custom audience like your website you say to facebook look these 10 000 people have visited my website or 500 or whatever it is um i'd like you to find me more people that are just like them and i would like you to create a lookalike audience for me so i can advertise to people that are just like the people that visit my website lookalike audiences are tremendously effective absolutely something i would recommend i'll include a link in the video description below which is all about look like audiences how you create them all that sort of stuff i think you're going to find that really useful so you can go through that but i just want to quickly mention that because if you're seeing this stuff pop up and you're thinking i can't look like audience as part of custom audiences and in my mind at least the most facebook advertisers will talk about them as separate things okay even if the nomenclature can be a little bit different okay right we've now created our custom audiences so let's go ahead and jump into ads manager and in ads manager i'll show you how to put these um custom audiences in and how we would make it work so let's go ahead and create a new campaign uh we'll go with conversions because that's what i'm normally advertising i'm going to click continue and i'm just going to jump into the ad set level okay because the answer level is where you add in your custom audiences don't worry about the rest of the stuff and you can see we've got this custom audiences section okay so if i click into here we now want to add the custom orders we've created so we want to add in our facebook page engages our instagram engages our video viewers i said for you there may also be lead forms there may not be some of these options you would want to add in your website visitors um we've we ended up for demonstration purposes creating a bit of a different one but there's probably one in here or website visitors there we go we want to add in i said this is an example account so there's all sorts of older stuff in here which is great uh we want to add in an email list okay and we want to add in go on let there be a customer list uh no there isn't already a customer list set up in here but you can you can imagine that email oh 320 is a customer list and that is what typically our um custom audience selection would look like okay so that is obviously going to differ between advertisers so some of you may not have i said a customer list or an email list just have to imagine that's a customer list um you may not have video viewers you may have lead forms instead but i've talked through this enough but hopefully at this point you understand which ones you want to be including depending on on your business things like that and i said you can also do exclusions so where i said before how we might be targeting people who visited certain pages like perhaps a sales page on a website but we want to go ahead and exclude this is how you do it you go ahead and exclude and let's say we would want to exclude there we go thank you page visitors 180 right people who have visited the thank you page means they've already bought we don't want to advertise them again post it you can see it um facebook's popping up these warnings post ios 14.5 um this is not as straightforward and as accurate as it used to be it's annoying i wish it wasn't the case particularly with website vista and custom audiences we might not some people might slip through if that makes sense these uh this this custom audience um because we just can't track what they're doing once they leave facebook and instagram as well as we used to be able to do which is annoying but just one of those things okay but this is how we would go about structuring it and i wouldn't automatically default to conclusions like our default would normally be something that imagine that's a customer list that looks very similar to this okay but once you get more advanced and more technical like i showed you and you want to be able to put in exclusions you can actually go ahead and do that and yeah hopefully see fantastic results and because of that i mean custom audiences are absolutely something that every facebook advertiser should be using it's a no-brainer i've heard people say things like yeah but after ios 14 and custom audiences aren't as good you're like okay but that's still great like they might not be quite as good as they were but it doesn't mean you don't want to be advertising to them they're still going to perform better than all your cold audiences virtually guaranteed unless you know something really weird has happened but virtually guaranteed you want to be advertising to them so get them in there and enjoy the better results before you go couple things i'll quickly mention the first is our facebook advertising services so my company lead guru is a specialist facebook and instagram advertising agency and we create manage and optimize facebook and instagram ad campaigns for our clients we have a minimum budget requirement of 3k per month if that sounds like something that's interesting to you if you'd like to find out more you can book a free no obligation 30 minute stretch session with one of my team members just click on the link in the description below you go through have a quick chat with them find out about our fees we can find out about your business super simple see if we want to work together another thing i want to talk about is um our it is youtube channel membership so i recently added youtube channel membership as an option and as my youtube channel has grown it's become so difficult for me to keep up with all the comments and questions and things like that so i'm prioritizing member comments so basically for a small monthly fee you can become a member of my youtube channel you get certain perks one of them is priority reply to comments i'm going to prioritize replying to comments i'm still going to try my best to reply to non-member comments as well but there's only so much time i can dedicate to that before it becomes silly um members also if you have a member of my channel you also get um access to member only polls so you can have a say in what content i create next if there's topics you particularly want me to cover so um so yeah and if you want to support the channel that's the best way to do it that's really appreciated if you found my content useful i'd be much appreciate you going ahead and becoming a member so yeah that's what i want to quickly mention and before you go smash that like button subscribe to the channel if you're new i release facebook advertising related content all the time and i will talk to you soon thanks a lot guys bye for now