Facebook's Tools
Targeting
Custom Audiences
I read a really cool story about an elaborate prank this one marketer played on his roommate using custom audiences. Essentially he created a Custom Audience of 1 person -- his roommate. And he started running eerily targeted ads towards him. For example, his roommate was a professional sword swallower but he gags every time he swallows a pill. So he targeted an ad from a fake pill seller:
I had a nice laugh about this. But this story illustrates the power of custom audiences. They are people who are your customers. People who you already know information about and have your own private repositories of data on them. You can use this power to custom tailor FB ads to your customers even better than FB’s general targeting categories can.
There are many ways you can form your custom audience. First, use your existing email lists (ex: from MailChimp), or customer lists (from your ecommerce software, or Stripe records). Next, you can ask FB to target visitors of your website. Remember that if you use the targeting pixel effectively, Facebook has a vast amount of information on them, including what stage of the funnel they are in (prospects, leads, conversions). You know what products they buy, if you use the product catalog feature effectively. You know their total lifetime value (are they a big spender).
The key to custom audiences is splitting up your lists into meaningful groups. You know information about these people that your competition does not. How can you use that information to your advantage?
As you get to know each customer, you automatically add to their “profiles” and then target them specifically using custom audiences.
Here are some ways you can split up your custom audience lists
By category of products they are interested in: say I have a pet shop that sells cat toys and dog toys. If I've figured out they are a dog owner, I can save a lot of money by not targeting them for cat ads.
Location: FB is guessing where exactly your customer lives. They know you live in NYC. But you might have a chain of stores all over the city. Since your customer has checked out in your Upper West Side location, or listed their home address on the Upper West Side, you can only target them for that store’s special sales
Who they know: I had an interesting use case. My friend runs a big acro yoga festival. People come from all over the country. What gets them in, is knowing that their favorite teachers are going to be there. So we created custom audience lists using the email lists of each teacher, targeting ads featuring that teacher to the people on the list
Ad Sequencing
This allows you to tell a “story” in FB. You target the same audience, but you show them different ads in a set order. For example Adaptly ran Refinery29’s 12 day campaign that first told their brand’s story, then provided product info. It produced 87% more subscriptions.
For advertising my friend’s AcroFest, we set the following ad sequence for the following:
Get people interested by starting off with a really cool acro video, sparking their interest in acro.
Lead into introducing the festival by showing different styles of acro that will be at the festival
Introduce of Facebook Event Page targeting a campaign to post their favorite Acro Moves for a free ticket
Show flash sale getting them to buy ticket
We could make these individual campaigns, but then, we wouldn’t be able to tell the story from scratch to each individual user. If they enter the funnel at a different time than our campaign is running, it will not make as much sense. With an Ad Sequence, they will be told the same story no matter when they see the first ad.
Dynamic Ads
Dynamic Ads are amazing for ecommerce companies and travel companies. They allow the user to create a product catalog, and then track activity of their customers on their website. If someone lingers on the checkout page of a certain item, they can directly target ads for that item. Furthermore, there don’t have to create separate ads for each product. They are dynamically generated off a feed.
A great integration of dynamic ads would be to use it in conjunction with the lookalike audiences to compare to existing buyers of a certain product and find segments of the population that are similar.
Another great use case is for the travel, hotel, restaurant, and airline businesses. They can have a dynamically updating feed of all of their hotels, flights, or restaurant locations over the country and target specifically to people who are visiting or are planning on traveling to those locations.
Segmenting Creatives
A/B Testing
If you’re doing Facebook advertising based off of your “theories” on what would work, rather than actual data, you’re doing it wrong. The most effective marketers constantly test their theories, comparing their different creatives, targeting strategies, and campaigns against each other. Facebook has a great tool for automating all of this. It lets you split test all these variations, and show you what works and what doesn’t.
Probably the most common use case would be to test which creative is the best performing. For a single campaign you may have 4 separate creatives. Facebook will randomly split who sees each creative and figure out which one you should use.
Lead Ads
Lookalike Audiences
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