Stop Being Sad and Use the Facebook Custom Audience

For us who manage complex multi-channels PPC campaigns, the Facebook custom audience is as awesome a tool as we could ask for!  It allows us to create highly targeted audiences based on specific actions or content that we actually control instead of a post written on a page by a user or some unverified information.

Custom Audience Kickstarter: the CSV Import

Start with the CSV import with email addresses or mobile phone numbers. This feature is a game changer. Every signup campaign with email addresses/mobile phone numbers is becoming even more valuable data. Craft different messages and make sure the action you want your audience to do is a more “engaged next step” towards your final objective(s).

Case Study… in progress

We have started to use custom audiences for different purposes, especially for e-commerce. A good application of the feature we are intensively working on right now is for an up-coming real estate project.

When the project is still a “paper project” and the website is not even online, we use landing pages to create an “early Interested” audience. We collect email addresses & mobile phone numbers only.  PPC is mostly used for acquisition and then traditional remarketing ensures that we increase our sign up rate.

The Facebook Custom Audience has provided us with an alternative to traditional remarketing and newsletters. We now have the chance to craft different messages, upload the batch email addresses or mobile phone numbers and then see the results in real time… and obviously: optimize based on conversions!

As indicated in the image above, there are also other options to test, such as the Remarketing Pixel from Facebook and the Mobile App user who performed an action.  So depends on your campaign infrastructure, the Custom Audience from Facebook is flexible.

Early Recommendations

To ensure maximum “Awesomeness” in your results, here are some recommendations to follow:

  1. Segment your custom audiences properly. Email Addresses should be one (audience), mobile phone numbers should be one (audience) as well and so on.
  2. Create an engagement path from acquisition (PPC or other sources) to loyalty (Custom Audiences) with actionable steps for the users.
  3. Segment ads (Mobile Newsfeed, Right Column, and Desktop Newsfeed) and adapt the image and messaging to ensure proper ad format.
  4. Exclude audiences that have performed an action and move them into another action cluster according to your engagement path defined in recommendation #2.
  5. A/B test your results with other initiatives such as email marketing or remarketing campaign.
  6. Define an engagement KPI and capitalize on it.

The Facebook success will always be achieved through a high level of segmentation. Custom Audiences is providing us more features to segment and isolate successful variables. I am certain that this will provide us a more dynamic top-level audience management system than email marketing and some remarketing platforms. In addition to being an “advanced social real-time audience management system”, the Power Editor makes it scalable!

In my next post I’ll share the actual optimized results. I am pretty sure those ones will be “legend… wait for the audience to engaged… dary”!

eric-cholette-Durour

eric-cholette-Durour

Entrepreneur and Founder at Planning Media, an internet advertising company that helps ad agencies and businesses to acquire, maintain, and retain customers via the internet. I am passionate about internet/digital/mobile advertising, and aviation. Everything is managed by data and passion: internet campaigns & aircraft.

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