Facebook Ads: Insights on Facebook Audience

hi there my name is Elizabeth and you've just tuned in to our Facebook audiences tutorial the fourth in a series on expert marketing tips and tricks for targeting customers once you've launched your campaign and it's been running for a few weeks it's time to start making data-driven decisions to make your ads as effective as possible strategically building your targeting audiences is the next important step in running a successful Facebook Ads campaign in this tutorial we'll be exploring different kinds of Facebook audiences and advising you on which are best for your ecommerce store we'll also be exploring strategies for targeting and retargeting your ads these are all key aspects in learning how you can direct your ads towards the audience that is most likely to purchase from your store so let's get started as we begin the tutorial its first important to know that there are three audience categories custom audience look-alike audience and saved audience which refers to interest targeting the custom audience category is made up of four subtypes customer file website traffic app activity and engagement custom audiences are used in two ways the first is for retargeting purposes you're creating an audience comprised of people who added something to their carts but didn't convert with the aim of retargeting that audience with another relevant ad the second time you would use these custom audiences is to build high relevance look-alike audiences we'll talk about those later in this tutorial for now let's explore the four different sub types of custom audiences at your disposal the customer files sub type of custom audiences allows you to create an audience using your customer information including their emails and phone numbers it simply matches your list with the corresponding Facebook accounts there are a few different ways to add new users you can easily connect your MailChimp account with Facebook and upload a list of your customers another option is to upload CSV or txt files directly to Facebook simply click add customers from your own file and then press upload file after uploading name your audience and press next these audiences are usually used for creating look-alikes your customer list makes a perfect seed audience for doing so you may also want to use this audience to upsell your existing customers you can segment email lists by the products they've bought and then show them the most relevant ads based on this information next the website traffic audience subtype of custom audiences allows you to create segmented audiences based on your web traffic this is a very handy way to effectively identify audiences for retargeting there are several options for creating a website traffic audience you can make the broadest one by choosing all website visitors this way Facebook will gather all of your web traffic to form one audience it's best to do this when you don't have a lot of web traffic and segmentation is not available it also provides a broad enough audience for you to create look-alikes from it as well usually I create several website traffic audiences by default these would include all visitors within the past seven days all visitors in the past 30 days and all visitors in the last 90 days I find these to be the best for retargeting with all visitors in the past seven days you're reaching hot traffic all visitors in the last 90 days is good for creating look-alikes because it's broad but still relevant the people who visited specific web pages tab can help you to easily segment your traffic this way you can make targeted remarketing campaigns that are laser-sharp by showing your visitors the most relevant products all you need to do is copy the portion of the URL that is unique to each product and Facebook will create this audience segment after choosing the you are that you want to make your audience from you can refine it even more you can choose from two options frequency and device this way you can make very interesting audiences by choosing frequency you can define how many times your potential customer visited a webpage you chose let's say you've made an audience based on web traffic to a specific pair of sneakers displayed on your site but set frequency to greater or equal to two now you have made a targeting audience derived of people who are interested in purchasing the sneakers which also contains people who visited your site two or more times and purchase them you don't want to spend your marketing budget on this audience because they've already completed this action to avoid that you need to make a more complex audience click the exclude button on the right side of the screen and select conversion event purchase now you've excluded all previous customers and are left with an audience of people who are very interested in this specific product you can retarget those with a discount ad or different variations of the same product when you have similar products or supplemental ones you can create an audience from people who visited specific web pages but not others in doing so you'll be ensuring that you're advertising these products to the right people you need to add another condition to your people who visited specific page audience press and also and then contains in the newly appeared URL insertion box select doesn't contain and insert the URL you want that your audience doesn't belong to keep in mind that all audiences have the same time span you can choose from 1 to 180 days just keep in mind that people who visited your store 180 days ago and haven't come back since might not be interested in your product anymore so it's best not to waste your money or their Facebook newsfeed space more advanced website traffic audience types include based on time span on your website and using your Facebook pixel events when creating audiences based on the amount of time spent on your website you have the option of choosing between 5% 10% and 25% of website visitors if you get a lot of traffic on your site you could create 5% of visitors who spent most of their time on your website which allows you to retarget them with very specific messages that are most relevant to your top users if you don't get that much traffic 25% would be a better choice because the audience segment is larger but bear in mind that the targeting is not as specific any of these seed audiences to be amazing for creating look-alikes but we'll talk about those later in this tutorial another type of targeting audience could be derived from your Facebook pixel data you can choose any conversion event available on your account and then make an audience out of everyone who has completed that event when creating a custom audience based on website traffic for instance just click the drop down menu which is set to all website visitors by default if you scroll down you can select from the conversion events automatically generated by Facebook when you select the event that is best for your audience usually its complete registration or purchase and also choose the time span of your audience you can refine that audience by some additional criteria the most powerful option here is frequency this way you can create an amazing seed audience for retargeting and look-alikes your customers are not equal some of them are impulse buyers and after they've purchased from you once it's possible that they won't return back to your site to identify repeat customers you can create an audience of people who have made purchases by setting the frequency of purchases made to at least three times these are the real fans of your brand so it's very important to build an audience like that in order to make the look-alike audiences as accurate as possible here you can also choose from several different frequency variations like is greater than equals and so on besides frequency you can also refine your audience by the type of device an operating system they're using this is very important because in doing so you may discover that iOS users buy much more than Android users or vice-versa it's important to note that by choosing all mobile devices you will also choose tablet users for now it's still unavailable to choose tablet users separately it's important to add that you can only target custom audiences of twenty or more people Facebook has this rule as part of their privacy policy also note that when uploading email lists the audience created as a result will typically be smaller than your actual email list because Facebook can't match every single email with the ones people use to log into Facebook now it's time to cover the newest variety of custom audience engagement audience from this subtype there are several different targeting options for you to choose from and you can gather various audiences from both Facebook and Instagram using traffic and engagement data engagement audiences can be broken down into six different types which include video lead forum canvas Facebook page Instagram business profile and event all of these are great for retargeting using engagement audiences you can make many different retargeting lists based on user behavior while interacting with your content let's take a quick look at each one individually we'll begin with video there are several different options for creating an audience from video engagement Facebook counts video views after three seconds so you can choose the number of user video has or you can go with percentage of video viewed to do this simply navigate to one of your videos and select your preferred options also note that the maximum timespan for extracting this data is no longer 180 days it's 365 percentage of video viewed tells you a lot about your audience you should definitely try to retarget users who have watched 75% or more of your video because these individuals are showing significant interest in your product just remember to always exclude your existing customers when retargeting these kinds of audiences there's no need to allocate your Facebook Ads budget to existing customers since email is a better channel for reaching out to them now let's go over lead form engagement audiences there are 3 options for creating an audience based on your potential customers behavior on lead forms you've already created a lead form is used to gather the contact information of your potential clients it's generated automatically by Facebook in other words when someone clicks on a lead ad he or she won't have to insert any relevant information because it's gathered automatically from his or her Facebook profile keep in mind that the maximum timespan for drawing on this kind of engagement data is 90 days the most useful target audience here is people who opened but didn't submit form because you can retarget them with different offers don't use the segment people who opened and submitted form for retargeting on Facebook you already have their emails so don't waste your money on paid advertising instead use your email list to send direct messages to those users the next category of engagement audiences on our list is canvas canvas ads are usually used by larger brands when they're searching for new opportunities to promote their offers therefore we don't need to dwell on this audience type for long canvas ads are only available on mobile it's basically a full-screen ad that loads really quickly after a user clicks on a typical ad display in their mobile newsfeed let's move on to Facebook page engagement it's the main audience category for you to play around with when choosing engagement based targeting there are a bunch of options to choose from and you can create an audience without any segmentation just by targeting anyone who has engaged with your store's Facebook page or posts alternatively you can go with more specific targeting options like people who sent a message to your page or people who saved your page or any post these audiences are great for retargeting purposes but don't forget to try them on look-alike audiences as well people who saved your page or message do their have already indicated their interest in your products so there's a high possibility that look-alike audiences will also be very useful here the maximum time span for Facebook page engagement is 365 days but don't get too carried away as people who engaged with your post several months ago may not be interested in your product or brand anymore usually going with a 90 day time span is sufficient with this audience also keep in mind that Facebook page engagement audiences are only using data from your Facebook page and messenger meaning that they don't use any information from your Instagram accounts or website moving on to Instagram engagement audiences you'll find that they are very similar to Facebook page audiences only that they draw upon Instagram account data instead the only major difference is that unlike Facebook engagement audiences you don't have the people who clicked any call to action button audience here the time span however is the same 365 days that said Instagram data is only available from June 2017 so you can't create an audience consisting of data from May 31st 2017 or earlier you've probably noticed that we've already mentioned the term look-alike audiences a couple of times throughout this tutorial the look-alike audience feature is a very powerful tool that you can use for your ad targeting in my opinion it's the most sophisticated targeting tool available on the Facebook ad system basically creating look-alike audiences allows you to reach people who are most similar to your seed audience this way you don't need to do as much research every time you want to target a relevant audience or identify a group of individuals who are most similar to your paying customers if you want to create a look-alike audience just go to your asset library and press create audience from here choose look-alike audience the first step to creating the actual look-alike audience is choosing the source this refers to the list of all eligible custom audiences you've created I recommend starting from your existing customer list or website visitors within the last 90 days as these seed audiences are the most relevant Facebook recently rolled out a new feature about the type of seed audience you can use for look-alikes from now on you can create a custom audience that is not only based on your customer list but also on the monetary value that a given user brings to your business click create new and then choose custom audience with LTV to access this feature after that a custom audience creation window will pop up the window is nearly identical to the customer files audience but this time the customers email isn't the only information that's required you should also include customer value if you want to learn more about it follow the link posted in the description below there you will find best practices on customer data preparation when creating custom audiences like this one Facebook can more accurately decide who is best included in your look-alike because you're telling the Facebook algorithm which kind of user has already brought you the most value after choosing the custom audience you must define in which country or countries you want that audience to be you can do so by typing a country's or selecting one from the drop-down menu you can also go a bit broader by instantly choosing an entire continent or opt for one of Facebook's provided regions the next step is choosing the audience size you can choose from 1% to 10% of your seed audience that means that an audience of 1% will be the smallest proportion possible but it will only be made up of people that are closest in similarity to your custom audience with 10% you will reach more people but they will not match the parameters you set in your custom audience targeting as closely always start with narrower audiences of 1% or 2% by clicking show advanced options an additional menu will appear from which you can create up to 6 look-alike audiences at once it's a very handy tool when you want to test out seed audiences quickly when targeting multiple look-alike audiences and running retargeting campaigns it's very important to make sure that you are not competing with yourself in Facebook auctions so far we've covered a bunch of different aspects of correctly targeting look-alike audiences but one additional thing to consider is excluding audiences to ensure this doesn't happen you need to exclude your audiences one from another you don't need to make them entirely mutually exclusive but there are some rules you should follow the smaller the percentage of your look-alike audience the closer and similarity this group will be to your original target audience therefore always exclude the narrower audience from the larger one for example if you're aiming for a look-alike audience based on 1% of your customers in the US and 3% of customers match the criteria you'll want to exclude the 1% that are most similar to your target audience from the 3% that match the criteria because that 1% will otherwise be automatically included as part of the 3% in order to do this simply hit the exclude button under the custom audience section when creating an ad set for all look-alike audiences you must exclude every retargeting list you are already using I would also suggest that you exclude all visitors as well as all customers audiences to ensure that you are only reaching new people when targeting with a look-alike audience if you're concerned that you are not excluding audiences as necessary note that you can always check audience overlap in your ads manager open asset library and check the boxes located beside the audiences you want to test press action in the menu located above and then select show audience overlap and that just about covers everything you need to know about targeting and creating the right audiences for your products and your brand so let's recap there are three different types of Facebook audiences custom look-alike and saved the best custom audience to use when creating your look-alike audience is simply your existing customer list and your website traffic from up to the last 90 days the engagement style audience is the best for retargeting and the look-alike audience is the most powerful tool for targeting always try to keep your look-alike audience narrow with between 1 to 2 percent similarity to your intended audience lastly remember that when running multiple targeting campaigns and targeting multiple audiences it's best to exclude your audiences from one another so that's it if you liked the video or have additional questions let us know in the comments section below and subscribe to stay up-to-date on more about best practices within the world of e-commerce in this tutorial will be about my face like a baguette I want chimes la they were giving me thumbs up and like good job I