Happy Q1 advertisers! The start of a new year and a new decade is truly a busy time where we all finalize 2020 budgets, assess the damage from 2019, and rethink our strategies across the board. We keep the winners rolling, sunset the losers, and get ready to pitch a flurry of new ideas to our clients. As someone who loves working within the ever-so-buggy Facebook, I’d like to share some must-have audiences to deliberate as you plan your strategy refreshes and see what’s missing from your accounts.
Core Audiences
At least one, if not multiple, core audience ad sets are suggested as a prospecting audience to reach net-new customers. By combining demographics, interests, location, and behaviors – advertisers can create very detailed pools of future customers based on the specific criteria. The most important note when curating these types of lists is to manage how large Facebook tells you your audience pool will be by location. If you are advertising with radius settings or other location limiters, then you will want to make sure you have enough core audiences layered in to be worthwhile.
First-Party
First-party data is collected directly by the business that is advertising. This type of data includes audiences like contact lists, past converters, content interactors, and even shopping cart abandoners. It is important to be mindful of where in the funnel these data pools are and that should dictate how you advertise to them. Additionally, do not forget about exclusions in Facebook. This is where I leverage these audiences the most by being able to exclude past converters or web visitors from my prospecting campaigns.
Website Visitors
There are a number of ways to utilize web visitors as an audience. Using the Facebook Pixel, advertisers can collect data directly into Facebook on user’s website behaviors. This allows us to remarket to anyone who has visited the website. Even more so, this allows us to market differently to users who have interacted with different pages on the website. For example, you could get as detailed as sending informative ads to viewers of your “about us” page or you could send “don’t forget” messaging to someone who added something to the shopping cart, then abandoned later.
Look-A-Likes
LAL audiences are one of the strongest features that an advertiser can leverage within Facebook Advertising. So strong, in fact, that I would recommend that you create a LAL audience with every single first-party data pool that you have access too. Contact lists, shopping cart bouncers, or past converters are all types of audiences that can be converted into a LAL audience. LAL’s are generally strong performers as they can prospect for customers very similar to people who have met past criteria for your business. Just make sure to keep a low percentage audience size (1%-3%) which helps keep your audience pool as similar to your list as possible.
Facebook Interaction
Very similar to website visitors and the strategies surrounding them, Facebook interactions can be leveraged to send specific messaging to those who have interacted with your business directly on your Facebook or Instagram pages without the need to install a pixel or tracking method. Some examples of these interactions are anyone who has engaged with your posts, someone who clicks on your CTA, or even people who message your page.
These 5 audience types should be leveraged to create a full-funnel approach to your advertising efforts. By strategically employing them across your various campaigns you will be able to understand more about your customer’s Facebook journey and the overall digital journey they take. For more information on Facebook and what to do during the new year, please take a look at Elliot Kemp’s post on Major Social Ad Platform Updates in 2019. Additionally, if you are looking for ad creation inspiration, look no further because Aaron Childs shows us how to view competitor ads in Facebook and Instagram with his post: How To Find Ads On Facebook and Instagram.
