Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
Table of Contents
1. Overview
• Website Custom Audiences vs. FBX
2.
Running a WCA Campaign
• Who Should Use WCA?
• Finding the Right Audience
• Basic WCA Targeting
• Leveraging And/Or Relationships
• Creating Lookalike Audiences with WCA
• Determining how many WCA to Create
• Driving Actions
• Choosing an Ad Type
• Creative Best Practices
• Bidding Amount & Types
• Tracking Results
• Establishing Measurement
3.
Examples
• Use Cases
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
01 Overview
Retargeting is far from new in the world of online marketing and advertising, and it’s no surprise why. While online shopping is on the rise, the average U.S. conversion rate for Q4 2013 was a mere 3.06% across sites and devices.
Fortunately, the 97% of people failing to convert are now easier to reach than ever.
Website Custom Audiences vs. Facebook Exchange
While both Website Custom Audiences (WCA) and Facebook Exchange (FBX) offer advertisers a way to retarget online users, the two advertising options vary in several ways. The major difference between the two lies the way audiences are used and ads are deployed.
In order to run FBX, advertisers must work with an approved third party partner who has access to the FBX inventory in a real-time bidding environment. Since FBX inventory is available through third party partners, there are limitations on the ad types and placement that can be used. WCAs on the other hand, can be accessed by any advertiser through power editor and can be utilized in combination with any ad type or placement on Facebook.
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
02 Running a WCA Campaign
Who Should Use WCA?
With any Facebook advertising campaign, strategy should be oriented toward specific pre-defined goals. If your brand is striving for website traffic, website conversions, app installs, or app engagement, then WCA can help drive specific, measurable results.
Finding the Right Audience with Basic WCA Targeting
Website Custom Audiences can be utilized to capture virtually any group of users who have visited your site. To establish targeting parameters, advertisers can create “rules” defining which website action(s) they want to include or exclude. These actions can include:
Page Visits: Target ads based on visit frequency to find
users repeatedly viewing your content.
Visit Frequency: Target ads based on visit frequency across
one or several pages to find users repeatedly viewing your content.
On-site behaviors: Isolate specific actions like registering,
placing an item in the a cart, pinning an item, reading an item’s description, or completing a form.
Exclusion audiences: Exclude users who have already
converted whom you do not want to reach again with your messaging. This allows you to maximize your ad dollars and eliminate waste.
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
Leveraging And/Or Relationships
To get more granular when defining WCAs, advertisers can stack actions and rules on top of each other using “and” relationships. For example, compounding rules an advertiser could create a WCA that targets users who have visited a certain page, and performed a specific action.
Sometimes the actions you exclude are just as important as the actions you include. Because they add a layer of complexity to your targeting, “and” relationships are ideal for disqualifying certain users from your audience lists.
For example, a shoe retailer could target a smaller audience, with a high intent to purchase.
Advertisers can use “or” relationships to broaden their targeting. For example, specifying one action “or” another allows advertisers to combine targeting segments. Let’s look at the same retailer, targeting a larger user base.
Visited a shoe site URL contains buyshoes.com
Added an item to their cart Event contains “added to cart” Product name includes “sandals” URL contains “sandals/collection/womens”
And And
Target with ads for free shipping “just in time for
summer”.
Visited
URL contains buyshoes.com/sale Visited the clearance section URL contains “buyshoes.com/clearance”
Sorted by price anywhere on buyshoes.com url contains “sort=price”
Or
Or
Target with ads for a “25% off all clearance
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
Creating Lookalike Audiences with WCA
Beyond using “or” relationships, advertisers can extend the reach of their WCA with
Lookalike Audiences. Mirroring the users identified in your initial WCA (or seed audience), Lookalike Audiences identify other Facebook users for ad campaign targeting.
WCA Lookalike Audiences can be optimized optimized in two ways:
Similarity: Selecting from the top 1% of similar users keeps audience size down, ensuring only the most relevant users are being included.
Reach: Selecting a similarity percentage of 5, 10 or 15%, allows you to broaden your reach by pulling from al larger base of users.
Keep in mind, Lookalike Audiences work best with a seed audience of 500 users, and can take 24-48 hours to fully populate.
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
Determining How Many WCA to Create
When selecting the most ideal page(s) to track with WCA pixels, start with your desired point of conversion and expand out if necessary.
You can determine additional relevant pages by back-tracking your users’
path-to-conversion. To cast a wider net, either select additional pages to include in your tracking or track pages further from your conversion point.
Keep in mind, as you build backwards from the conversion point your potential audience will become larger and less refined, which may increase reach but cause a decrease in CTR.
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
Driving Actions
Choosing an Ad Type
When choosing an ad type, focus on driving actions. Facebook recommends two primary ad types for website retargeting and off-site conversions:
• Page post link ads
• Convey larger quantities of information using images, post text, and link descriptions.
• A large clickable area drives users off-site to spur conversions.
• Mobile app install and engagement ads
• Clear CTAs make these ideal for customer discovery and acquisition, along with retention, engagement and conversion.
Creative Best Practices
WCAs offer advertisers the unique ability to serve content directly tied to their online behavior. As such, any creative used should incorporate hyper-relevant imagery and copy, designed to mimic the exact page, product, or experience being tracked.
Some additional considerations:
• Keep copy short and direct, providing the user with a reason to click.
• Including one of Facebook’s 5 CTA buttons can help explicitly convey the action you want users to take (Shop Now, Learn More, Sign Up, Book Now, or Download). • For any campaign, it’s a good idea to run at least 5 images x 5 copy lines per $1k
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
Bidding Amount
While bidding best practices vary depending on ad and conversion type, consider a higher bid for consumers who have indicated a higher likelihood of purchase.
Bidding Type
Begin by pairing bidding types to ad types, for for instance:
• oCPM optimizes for conversions, making it ideal for driving off site actions.
• CPC on the other hand, primarily drives clicks, and should be used for driving higher
volumes of traffic.
Test the ad type best suited for your campaign goal, as well as at least one additional type to gauge which drives performance.
Tracking Results
Establish Measurement
Unlike traditional online retargeting, in which data is often fragmented and reliant on
proxies, WCA retargeting allows for unified cross-device results, measured against goals for real people, not proxies.
• Establish specific ROI goals tied to pages and action. For example, increase a registration page’s conversion rate by 3%, or drive 20,000 ebook downloads.
• When measuring results, keep your original objective in mind (website traffic, website conversions, app installs, or app engagement) to ensure the goals you’ve identified are directly applicable to your campaign.
• Measure results across devices using conversion pixels, Facebook SDKs, and third party data.
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
03 Examples
To illustrate the many uses for WCA, we’ve outlined several use cases:
Marathon Coordinator
Goal: Implement a last minute push for registrations, by targeting users who have yet to
sign-up.
Action: Begin by targeting users who have visited the registration page, using an
exclusion rule to ensure you’re only targeting users who have failed to sign up.
Additionally, create a Lookalike Audience to mirror runners who have already signed up for the race by by tracking form submissions online. Serve Page post ads to similar Facebook users. Isolating only those living within 100 miles of the race course.
Department Store
Goal: With a large shoe sale approaching, find users who have browsed your site recently,
with the intention of purchasing a pair of shoes.
Action: Establish targeting rules to define an audience of users who have placed
something in their shopping cart within the past week, only including items from your shoe-related subpages. Serve these users RHS ads featuring the last shoe they placed in their cart.
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
University
Goal: Many prospective students browse your website on a daily basis. Encourage your
most engaged audiences to request a brochure to learn more.
Action: Place separate tracking pixels on each academic department’s individual landing
pages to serve major-based domain ads to retargeted visitors. Set up each individual ad so it drives to a landing page for relevant departmental brochure.
Cred Card Company
Goal: Having just launched a new airline miles rewards credit card, you want to drive
current customers to upgrade to this new premium option.
Action: Track users who have visited the card’s landing page on your site. Create a
Lookalike Audience to mirror these interested users, then target both the original and new Lookalike Audiences with Page Post Link ads containing destinations you can travel to with your reward points. Ensure you’re not wasting money by using an exclusion rule that removes any users who have already clicked on the “apply now” .
Website Custom Audiences Guide
Overview, Best Practices, and Use Cases for
Facebook Website Custom Audiences
Conclusion
Retargeting, if used correctly, can drive efficiency and impact as a part of any online
advertising strategy. Using Website Custom Audiences it’s easier than ever for marketers to reach the right people, drive them to act, and measure results.
Grounded in bottom-line business objectives, brands can use WCA to serve users hyper-relevant messaging, generated by real-time actions. This layer of instant relevancy helps re-engage consumers to drive valuable website conversions, measurable ROI, and long-term results.
Contact us:
Interested in learning more about our Custom Audience tools? Contact us via: [email protected]
877.357.6480
