Now, with Custom Audiences, you can use first-party data from your website to increase the effectiveness of your Facebook campaigns. How? The Custom Audiences pixel - a line of code generated by Facebook that, when embedded within your site, records user activities and matches these users to their unique Facebook identity.
Once the pixel is activated, Facebook will create a continually updated Custom Audience of individuals who have visited your website, which can then be targeted with ads. Because these individuals have already shown interest in your business or product, they are far more likely to become new or repeat customers and at a significantly lower price.
Known more widely as Custom Audiences from websites, this targeting tool makes it easy to achieve three marketing goals common to online marketers:
- Recapture intending customers
- Discover untapped audiences
- Scale successful audience segments
Below, we show you how Custom Audiences from websites can be used in your Facebook advertising campaigns to achieve each of these goals.
Recapture Intending Customers
On average, only 2% of your website visitors will make a purchase on their first visit; however, that in no way means they aren't interested. If anything it's quite the opposite - if retargeted with an ad many of these visitors will return to your site and become paying customers.
By tracking website visitors - an audience that has already expressed intent to buy - and placing them in a Facebook audience of authentic identities, Custom Audiences from websites makes it easy to recapture these high value customers. These audiences are more likely to click on your ad, return to your site, and make a purchase, and, because little testing or guesswork is involved, often convert at a much lower cost to the advertiser. This process can be further enhanced by retargeting people with ads based on the page they visited or the specific action they took on the site, such as searching for a product, or viewing a certain product page.
Ampush regularly sees retargeting campaigns using Custom Audiences from websites drive three times higher conversion rates and a 65% lower CPA than campaigns using Facebook's other targeting tools.
Discover untapped audiences
Generating awareness and attracting new customers that have no prior relationship with your brand is a top priority when launching a new product, brand or just generally growing your customer base. In these cases, where an entirely new set of customers is desired, it is important to not waste dollars showing ads to people who fall into the "current customers" category.
With Custom Audiences from websites you can ensure your budget is used for its intended purpose by excluding past customers from from your targeting. Using data collected with the pixel, it is easy to see which people have already completed transactions on your website and therefore should be excluded from ad campaigns. This way, you can rest assured that only people who have no prior relationship with the brand are seeing your ads and that campaigns tailored to this segment aren't falling on deaf ears.
Scale successful audience segments
The data the Custom Audience pixel collects from your website is not only valuable for finding your current customers on Facebook, it can also be used to identify new audiences that are highly similar to your customer base.
Using its massive cache of data, Facebook can determine what interests, behaviors or other similarities prevail among your customers and use this data to create an entirely new audience of Facebook users that express similar traits, known as a "lookalike" audiences. These can be created based on all of the data from your website or - for best results - only your highest performing segments (think people that make big ticket purchases or complete multiple transactions each month). For example, an online store that wants to find more people to buy a high end line of products can create a Custom Audience of people that have made purchases of over $250 on their site and specifically use this segment to create a lookalike audience.
Once you know what goals can be achieved with Custom Audiences from websites, and have identified this tool as a worthy mechanism for achieving these goals at your company, the next step is setting up your pixel. Stay tuned for our next post (coming next week) which outlines step by step how to setup the Custom Audiences pixel with insider tips from our media team.