Ever felt like you just can’t reach enough people with your promotions/offers? FB ads provide you with 5 ways of accelerating your promotion plans – so consider adding FB ads to your marketing budgets and strategy. There are now over 1200 demographic FB ad targeting options, and with custom audience lists and website audience lists, you can unleash a whole new audience via the power of the “lookalike” audience.
Already using FB ads but not getting the results you’d like?
Targeting people on FB via the “interests” option can be hit and miss, and can lead to lower relevancy scores (which means higher click costs and lower reach on FB), but, if you have not yet got a list of people who are likely to buy your product or service that you want to promote or you haven’t got many website visitors, it is the first place to start when testing audiences on FB ads. However, I’d also encourage you to look at other targeting which may well provide you with many more opportunities – you can now target your audience by education, job title, income bracket, employer name, or by behaviours (ie, purchase behaviour, FB page admins) to name just a few! The more specific you’ve been in your avatar creation when mastering your market, the more options you can use within the FB audience. So, before you start with Facebook ads, be super specific in who you want to see your adverts, the more you know about your ideal customer, the better. If your audience selection is “too broad”, (you’ll see this message within the ad set creation when you’re creating your FB ad audience), you can also narrow the audience, ie they must have something from the first list AND THEN something from the second list, and you can also EXCLUDE people so that your ad doesn’t get shown. 
The audience is too broad, so we need to narrow it down
Here’s how FB ads can really add power to your promotion plans:
- You’ve emailed your promotion invitation to your list, but not everyone has opened it
- You’ve had people click onto your promotion, but they haven’t taken action
- You’ve had people click on certain pages on your website which would mean that they’re most likely to benefit from the product or service that you want to target in your next promotion
- You’ve got a list, but it’s not very big and you want to reach a bigger audience that is similar to your list
- You’ve got website visitors, but you’d like to reach a bigger audience that is similar to your existing website visitors
#1: TARGETING PEOPLE ON FB WHO HAVE NOT OPENED YOUR EMAIL
You’ve emailed your promotion invitation to your list, but not everyone has opened it. This is likely to happen to EVERYONE – I’ve never yet met someone with 100% open rate, and depending on the niche that you’re in, your open rates could be anything from 10% to 40%. Even with a 40% open rate, that’s still a whole lot of people who didn’t see your promotion offer.
How to fix that using FB ads:
- Send your promotion invitation to the relevant list in your email marketing platform
- A couple of days later, check your open reports
- How many people have not yet opened your email
- Export the list of people who haven’t opened your promotion invitation email as a CSV file
- Remove all fields except for email addresses
- Open FB ads manager
- Navigate to audiences
- Create a custom audience
- Click on customer file
- Choose the CSV file you’ve just downloaded containing the email addresses of the people who haven’t yet opened your promotion invitation email
- Upload your CSV file
- Name your audience – to make it easy, I use the same name as my promotion plan, as it makes it easier as you run more and more promotions
- Facebook will then create your audience – they create the audience by finding everyone that logs into FB with the email addresses that you’ve added within your CSV file – not everyone will use those emails to log into FB with, however, even if you reach 50% of those, that’s still an opportunity to exploit!
- It can take a while for FB to create the audience, and they let you know that your audience is ready for targeting through a FB notification
- Now set up your FB ad, using the custom audience that you’ve created
#2: TARGETING PEOPLE WHO CLICK YOUR PROMOTION BUT DON’T TAKE ACTION
NB- This must be set up PRIOR to you promoting your promotion
Before running this type of ad, you’ll need to have a FB pixel installed across your whole website, and you’ll also need to have an action completed page set up on your website – for example: I click on your promotion landing page, and I opt-in, you’ll need to create a page on your website that displays once I’ve opted-in, so that we can determine whether people have taken the desired action.
To obtain your FB pixel:
- Open FB ads manager
- Navigate to pixels
- If you don’t already have a pixel created, click on create a pixel
- Place the code in your website header (if you have a WordPress website, there are plug ins for this)
- Download the pixel helper HERE so that you can ensure that the pixel is installed and working correctly
- If you are unsure whether you already have your pixel installed on your website, navigate to your website, and then use the Facebook Pixel helper chrome plug-in (see the Pixel helper here)
- Once your pixel is installed on your website, go to FB ads manager
- Navigate to audiences and click on create custom audience
- Click on website traffic
- In the website traffic field, choose the option “People visiting specific pages but not others”
- The first URL is for your landing page
- The second URL is the completed action page – ie “thanks for opting in”
- Depending on the length of your promotion, set the “in the last number of days” field to between 30-90 (I always choose 90 as my promotions run quarterly)
- Create an audience name that is relevant to your promotion – IE Promo name + Audience + action not taken
- Now set up your FB ad for the audience that you’ve created – please note that the audience will most likely be too small to begin with if you’ve just installed the pixel, as FB won’t have enough website visitor clicks to show adverts to… keep checking back regularly on the size of your audience
#3: TARGETING PREVIOUS WEBSITE VISITORS WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM YOUR NEW PROMOTION
NB – you will need to have had your FB pixel installed for a while or have high website traffic for this to yield a good size audience
There will be certain pages on your website that are about your products or services that are more likely to be visited by potential buyers. For example, if we targeted an ad to people looking at our home page on www.socialaccelerators.com we can’t be sure exactly what people are looking for, but we could target an advert to people who are visiting our training and workshops page https://www.socialaccelerators.com/services/training-and-workshops/ as we know that they are people who want to learn how to use social media to promote their businesses/products/services and the ad would be specifically for training.
- Identify the “buying signals” pages on your websites – these are pages that are visited by people who are most likely to do business with you – some of these buying signals pages could actually be blog posts if they are about a specific thing that links in with your overall promotion
- Navigate to FB ads manager
- Navigate to audiences and click on create custom audience
- Choose website traffic
- Choose the option People who visit specific website pages
- Add the URLs of all the buying signals pages/blog posts that would have been visited by people who are most likely to buy the product or service in your promotion
- Choose the number of days that you want the visitors to have been on your site (again, I choose 90 days as our promotions runs quarterly)
- Create an audience name that is relevant to your promotion – IE Promo name + website visitors
- Now set up your FB ad for the audience that you’ve created – please note that the audience will most likely to too small to begin with if you’ve just installed the pixel, as FB won’t have enough website visitor clicks to show adverts to… keep checking back regularly on the size of your audience
#4: YOUR LIST ISN’T BIG ENOUGH OR YOU WANT TO REACH PEOPLE WHO ARE SIMILAR TO PEOPLE ON YOUR LIST
FB ads provide a great way of reaching new audiences that are similar to people on your list through their lookalike audience capability.
- Choose the most appropriate list to target that would be interested in your promotion from your email marketing platform
- Download the list (don’t forget to download unsubscribes too, as we can still show them adverts, and we’re not breaking rules, as we’re not going to email them, we’re going to show them a FB ad instead) in CSV file
- Remove all fields except for email addresses
- Navigate to FB ads manager
- Navigate to audiences and click on create custom audience (if you have not already uploaded this CSV list that you’ve just created already to Fb audiences)
- Click on customer file
- Choose the CSV file you’ve just downloaded containing the email addresses of the people who haven’t yet opened your promotion invitation email
- Upload your CSV file
- Name your audience – to make it easy, I use the same name as my promotion plan, as it makes it easier as you run more and more promotions
- Wait for FB to say that your audience is now ready
- Once you’ve received notification from FB that your audience is ready, return to FB ads manager, and click on audiences
- Next click on the name of the audience that you want to create a lookalike audience for
- Next click on create lookalike audience
- Choose the country that you wish to target
- Leave audience size at 1% (in the example above, the audience size is 395,500 people!)
- Then click create audience
- FB will notify you when your new lookalike audience is ready
- Once you’ve received notification that your lookalike audience is ready, you can set up your FB ads, using the custom audience as “list name lookalike”
#5: YOU’D LIKE TO TARGET PEOPLE SIMILAR TO YOUR WEBSITE VISITORS
FB ads provide a great way of reaching audiences that are already similar to your website visitors. The best time to set up the audience for this is just before you send out your first email to promote your promotion, as this ensures that the website audience is the most relevant to your promotion. You must have the FB pixel installed on your website prior to creating your website visitor lookalike audience within FB ads
- If you have not already created a website audience list, follow the instructions in SCENARIO THREE first
- To create a website lookalike audience, navigate to FB ads manager
- Click on the website visitor audience that you want to create a lookalike for
- Choose the country that you want to target as lookalikes
- Keep the audience size to 1%
- Then click create audience
- FB will notify you when your new lookalike audience is ready
- Once you’ve received notification that your lookalike audience is ready, you can set up your FB ads, using the custom audience as “website traffic list lookalike”
If you find this useful, please share this with your networks. If you want to run FB ads to support your promotion plan, and would prefer to outsource this, please contact us for a quote on 01245 791969 or email us at [email protected] with title FB ads quote request
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