the ultimate guide to facebook custom audiences
TRANSCRIPT
The Ultimate Guide to
FacebookCustomAudiences
2016 Update!
by
by Massimo Chieruzzi
CEO, AdEspresso
Table of contents
1. What are Custom Audiences?
2. How to Create a Customer List Custom Audience
3. How to Create a Website Custom Audience
4. How to Create an App Activity Audience
5. How to Create a Lookalike Audience
6. How to Target Your Facebook Ads to a Custom Audience
7. 7 Ideas To Boost Your Campaigns with Custom Audiences
8. Doing More With Custom Audiences and AdEspresso
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There’s a reason why all of the top marketers are using Custom Audiences in their Facebook Ads - they actually work! If you’re not using them already, chances are you’re losing money, which clearly shouldn’t be in your marketing plan!
If you’re not up on Custom Audiences, here are some case studies that quickly prove their worth:
A KingNet: +75% CTR, +46.6% Conversion Rate, 43.37% lower CPA
A OpenSky: +30% Conversion Rate
A JackThreads: 30% Lower CPA for member signups
A KIXEYE: 2x Higher conversion rate, 5.5X higher LifeTime Value
If Facebook Ads are already working for you, Custom Audiences can make your ROI skyrocket to new heights.
If you’re in a niche where Facebook Ads tend to be a less-effective channel, such as B2B, Custom Audiences can make your ads work much better and reach hundreds of thousands of more customers in the process.
Want proof? We experienced the power of Custom Audiences ourselves. As a B2B startup, Facebook wasn't our most effective acquisition channel. Now, thanks to Custom Audiences, it generates more signups than Google AdWords at just one-third of the cost!
In this ebook, you’ll discover what Custom Audiences are, how to start using them, and some of the best ideas to grow your business with them! Let’s get started.
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Chapter One WHAT ARE CUSTOM AUDIENCES? 1
Custom Audiences are an extremely effective way for marketers to target their Facebook Ads. Through Custom Audiences, you can target your Facebook Ads with a list of email addresses, phone numbers, website visitors, fan page members, Facebook user IDs, and even engagement!
The opportunities for precisely targeting potential customers are basically endless. You’re no longer limited to hard-guessing your advertising targets by gender or vague interests. Instead, you can target a very precise niche of highly-targeted users.
Let’s look at an example: Say you have an email
list of 10,000 customers who’ve bought your product. You want to promote the launch of an updated product version to these customers. By simply uploading your email list to Facebook, you'll create a new Custom Audience. Facebook will then try to match those email addresses with its users.
For the sake of our example, let’s say Facebook was able to match 70% of your list. You can now target advertising for the new, improved version of your product to 7,000 customers who already loved the previous one - I bet the conversion rate will be pretty high!
This example is just the beginning. Since Custom
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Audiences launched in October 2013, Facebook has continually made significant updates, making it much more powerful and flexible than ever before.
Here are your options for custom audiences:
Standard Custom AudienceUpload a list of emails, phone numbers, or Facebook User IDs you want to target and Facebook will match them with it’s users. Facebook will usually match between 60-80% of the contacts on your list.
Website Custom AudiencesWebsite Custom Audiences means you don’t need to have target users' email addresses or phone numbers. Instead, simply insert the Facebook Pixel tracking code on your website and you’ll be able to target your Facebook Advertising for
all users that have visited a specific page on your website during a set time period of up to 180 days.
If this marketing technique sounds familiar, it’s because it's basically Retargeting on Facebook without the hassle and the costs of the FBX program.
App Activity Custom AudiencesYou can create audiences based on what actions people take when they use your app - either on Desktop or Mobile. You can create audiences of people who recently opened your app, recently completed a purchase, completed large purchases, or achieved a certain level in your game or platform. For example, you can create an audience of those who have used your app previously, but not used it in the last 30 days.
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Lookalike Audiences
Once you’ve created a Custom Audience, you can ask Facebook to create a broader Lookalike Audience to target your ads towards similar users. Facebook will look for patterns and characteristics your users have in common - such as age, gender, or interests - and create a much bigger list of very similar users.
With the ability to immediately expand your list and target users who are likely to convert, you can see why Lookalike Audiences are so powerful.
Since launching, Facebook has expanded Lookalike Audiences, allowing you to create them based on your Facebook Page fans, website visitors, and customer lists.
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Getting Started with Custom Audiences
To create your first Custom Audience, go to the ”Audience" section of the Facebook Power Editor or Ads Manager.
In the Ads Manager, it’s under the Tools section. Select “Audiences.”
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In Power Editor, it has its own section, right under the the toolbar right beneath your ad account number:
Since this is your first Custom Audience, you'll need to create a new one by clicking the green “Create Audience” button. A popup window will open and ask you to pick which type of audience you’d like to create.
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Chapter Two HOW TO CREATE A “CUSTOMER LIST” CUSTOM AUDIENCE2
Let’s select the “Customer List” option. These are also where you can put your leads - or potential customers. You’ll have two options to sync “customer lists:
A. Manually upload your audience in a .txt or .csv file.
B. Sync your Email CRM to your Facebook Ads Account
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A. Manual Upload
To get started, you’ll need to prepare a file containing the contacts you want to add to your Custom Audience. Use a CSV/Excel file or open a simple text editor and insert one value per line like this:
Remember, your file can contain either email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook User IDs, or mobile advertiser IDs. Note that you cannot mix different data types. This means your file should contain only emails, only phone numbers, and so on.
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Give your Custom Audience a short, easy-to-remember name that describes this specific audience. Some ideas include "Former customers," "Email signups," or something similar.
Add a description. You'll eventually want to use this field to insert notes every time you add a new audience. However, you don't have to worry about it at this point.
A Select what’s inside the file you created, such as emails, phone numbers, etc.
A Select the .txt or .csv file you previously created from your computer.
A Agree to Facebook's Terms and Conditions (more on this later)
A Click "Create Audience". According to how big your file is, it may take some time for Facebook to match your list content with Facebook users.
A Once your audience has been created and it’s ready to go, you’ll receive a notification. You can go back on the “Audience” page and see how many users have been matched.
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HOW TO MANUALLY UPLOAD WITH ADESPRESSO
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Creating a Customer List Custom Audience on AdEspresso is simple and in-line with what you’ve already learned for Facebook’s Ads Manager and Power Editor
1. Login into AdEspresso.
2. Go to "Tools → Custom Audiences"
3. Click “Create Audience”.
4. Select the first option, Data File - Custom Audience.
5. Now create your audience exactly as you’d do it on Facebook: Pick a title, a description, select the content type of your file, and the data file to upload.
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B. Syncing with Your Email CRM
Facebook currently only supports MailChimp integration to sync custom audiences. For every other CRM, you’ll have to use third party tools to add new leads that you acquire to your email lists, or add your email lists to custom audiences. Lucky for you, we have this feature in AdEspresso!
With AdEspresso’s Data Sync feature, it’s easier than ever for businesses and marketers to sync up all the necessary contacts and leads! New leads will be added to your email list, which can be used to create new custom audiences, both of which are tools that can and should be used to increase conversion rates and build rapport with your new leads!
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HOW TO DATA SYNC WITH ADESPRESSOYou can do this with AdEspresso in 5 easy steps.
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Step 1: Choose your CRM or email marketing tool as your source.
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Step 2: You select which email list you’ll pull the contact information from.
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Step 3: You choose your target choice, which will be Facebook (for now).
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Step 4: You choose your associated ad account and which existing (or new) Custom Audience to add these contacts too.
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Step 5: You’ll set up your mapping fields to make sure all the information is transferred correctly.And then just review, and you’re done!
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Chapter ThreeHOW TO CREATE A WEBSITE CUSTOM AUDIENCE3
Custom Audiences created from customers - or leads - allow you to target your advertising at the right people and achieve awesome ROI’s for your ad spend. However, what do you do if you don’t have a big enough database of emails, Facebook User IDs, or phone numbers to create your own Custom Audiences? This is where the power of Website Custom Audiences comes in. This feature doesn’t require you to have any data about the users you want to target. All you have to do is wait for a user to visit your website. Thanks to a special tracking code - the Facebook Pixel - Facebook will recognize users and automatically add them to an Audience, making them ready to be re-targeted with advertising.
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HOW TO INSTALL THE FACEBOOK PIXEL
Go to your Facebook Pixel Tab in Ads Manager
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1. Click Create a Pixel
2. Enter a name for your pixel. There's only one pixel per ad account, so choose a name that represents your business.
3. Make sure you've checked the box to accept the terms
4. Click Create Pixel. If already have one, you won't see the Create Pixel button.
5. Your Facebook Pixel tracks multiple events depending on the page.
You’ll want to add the Pixel to all pages you want to track, so ask a developer to help, or use a plugin that automatically does this for you. For WordPress, we know many people use PixelYourSite.
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If you want to check to make sure your Facebook Pixel is working, download the free Google Chrome Extension, Pixel Helper.
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CREATING YOUR FIRST WEBSITE CUSTOM AUDIENCE (WCA)
With the Facebook Pixel installed, you can now create your first website custom audience.
In Facebook Ads Manager, click on the “Audience” button in the menu, and then click the “Create Audience” button at the top-right of the page. A popup will ask you what kind of audience you want to create.
1. Select “Custom Audience From Your Website”
2. Facebook will ask you to agree to the Terms & Conditions for Website Custom Audiences and provide a link to get your tracking pixel.
3. You can choose to add every user to your Custom Audience who has visited any page of your website or those who qualify according to specific rules. Rules are powerful and pretty easy to create. You can include or exclude people who visited a given url. Clicking the “+” icon will add another rule.
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For example, you could target everyone who visited your checkout page, expressing an intention to buy, but didn’t see the "Thank You" page (meaning they did not complete the purchase). This gives you a "second chance" to get them to complete their purchase. Finally, you can select how many days to track website visitors. This means that your audience will only include people who match the specified rules during the last X days. While Facebook’s suggested value is 30, the maximum value is 180 days.
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Building an effective Website Custom Audience really depends on how much traffic you’re getting and how strict your chosen rules are. If your website receives a lot of traffic, you can stick with 30 days or even less.
On the other hand, if your website doesn’t have a lot of traffic, or you’ve set very strict rules, it may be wise to set this value to 180 days so you don't end up with an audience that's too small. In either case, the sooner you reach out to potential customers through ads, the more likely they are to be effective. Targeting Website Custom Audiences works exactly like any other audience you’ve created so far: start typing the name and select it when the autocomplete shows up. It's as simple as that.
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How to do it in AdEspresso
Creating Website Custom Audiences in AdEspresso is extremely simple:
� Go to "Tools → Custom Audiences".
� Click on "Create Audience", and then select “Custom Audience from your Website”.
� You’ll then need to give your new audience a name and select the rules for inclusion. The options are the same as Facebook’s: Just hit the "+" icon to add a new rule.
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ADVANCED WEBSITE CUSTOM AUDIENCES
For those that really want to dive into their website visitors, Facebook released upgrades in May 2016 that allow highly detailed targeting based on the intensity of interest visitors display on your website.
Simply put: some visitors are more valuable than others. And Facebook will now help you figure out which ones are most likely to convert to leads or customers.
Under Website Traffic, choose the “Custom Combination” parameter to get started. You’ll need to switch over to “Advanced Mode” to see these features, and Facebook may or may not have rolled out all of them to your particular ad account.
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A Frequency: how many times a website visitor performs an action, i.e. visit a page. This is currently the most robust, and has been rolled out to the most ad accounts.
A Dynamic date: This allows you to target those visitors who have visited over a range of dates rather than a set number of previous days.
A Aggregated values: total amount of time a person has spent on a page or combination of pages
A Devices: including Android, iOS devices, desktop and other mobile devices. You an exclude or include each as their own separate value.
You can also target based on Standard Events website visitors take on your site:
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And to get even more complex? Combine these metrics with each other! There’s an “include” function and “exclude” function depending on events or URLs. You can also keep it simple though. For example, you can target users who accessed your site on mobile or desktop.
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Chapter FourHOW TO CREATE AN APP ACTIVITY CUSTOM AUDIENCE4
With mobile being the dominant platform for Facebook ads, it only makes sense that creating audiences based on app activity is quickly becoming one of the leading forms of custom audiences. For example, you can target people who previously used your app, but have not come back to your app within the last month. Or you can target people who have added an item to their cart on your app, but never actually purchased it. Target them with a discount coupon and voila!
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You can create audiences based on actions a user did or didn’t take within your app!
The actions (or non-actions) you can currently target are:
A Recently Opened your App
A Recently Completed a Purchase
A Completed Large Purchases
A Achieved a Certain Level in your Game
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How to do it in Adespresso (App Audience)
� Go to "Tools → Custom Audiences".
� Click on "Create Audience", and then select “Custom Audience from Mobile App”.
You’ll then need to give your new audience a name and select the rules for inclusion.
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Chapter FiveHOW TO CREATE A LOOKALIKE AUDIENCE5
Lookalike Audiences are a great addition to the Facebook Advertising toolbox. They allowyou to create a broader Audience of people very similar to those already inside one of your Custom Audiences. It's not hard to guess how powerful this feature can be. For example, you could create a Custom Audience with 10,000 of your customers and get a Lookalike Audience with 200,000 people who are very similar to your customers and ready to be targeted with advertising! This example is just the tip of the iceberg!
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Since you have to use the complex Power Editor to make them, creating a Lookalike Audience is a bit trickier than creating a Custom Audience. Here's how to do it:
A Assuming you’ve already created your first Custom Audience, head to the “Audience” tab in Power Editor. Simply click the green “Audience” button on the right. For Ads Manager, click on “Tools” -> “Audience” -> “Create Lookalike”
A Click on the audience you want to use as a base for your new LookAlike Audience.
A Below the list, you’ll get a name and description of your audience and three action buttons. The first two are to add and remove users from your audience. The last one is the one we’re looking for: “Create Lookalike Audience”. Click It.
A Insert a name for your new Lookalike Audience, then select the country you'd like your Lookalike Audience users to be in. Unfortunately, you can only create a Lookalike Audience that targets users of a single country. However, if you're using AdEspresso, you can quickly and easily generate multiple Lookalike Audiences to target users in multiple countries.
The last parameter, “Optimize for”, is very interesting. It allows you to specify a smaller reach with better similarities to your original Custom Audience. It also allows you to reach more people, though at the risk of lower similarities. We always suggest optimizing for similarity even if it means having a lower overall reach. This ensures your campaigns will perform better overall.
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It takes Facebook longer to generate Lookalike Audiences than Custom Audiences. Once you’ve completed your request for a new Lookalike Audience, it can take from several hours to a couple of days before your brand new audience is ready to be used for ad targeting.
The smallest lookalike audience, by default, is 1.9 million.
You can create a lookalike audience of:
A Page Fans
A Email Lists
A Current/Previous Customers
A Website Custom Audiences
A App Activity
A Engagement (Video, App, Posts, and more very soon)
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How to do it in AdEspresso
� Go to "Tools → Custom Audiences" and click the “Create Lookalike” button next to the Custom Audience you want to use as the base. You can also use AdEspresso to create Lookalike Audiences for multiple countries at once.
� Just type the name of the countries you’re interested in.
� AdEspresso will create one Lookalike for each country. It'll also append the target country's name after the base audience's name in your audience list, making it easy to keep track of your audiences.
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Chapter SixHOW TO TARGET YOUR FACEBOOK ADS TO A CUSTOM AUDIENCE6
Targeting Audiences are extremely simple. Start with opening the Facebook Ads Manager and create a new ad. After you’ve created your ad’s creative, you’ll get to the “Audience” section. Choose the first option, “Custom Audiences”. By placing them as the first option, Facebook is making a big effort to get you to use Custom Audiences when setting your target demographic. There’s a reason for this: Custom Audiences work great! Just start typing the name of the Custom Audience you want to target and select it from the autocomplete list.
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If you want, you can select more than one Custom Audience to increase your reach.Simple, right? But wait, there’s more! Once you’ve selected an audience, you’ll notice that hovering your mouse cursor over it will cause two icons to appear. The X deletes your audience and clicking the down arrow gives you the option to exclude the audience. This can be extremely powerful as we’ll see in Chapter 7.
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How to do it on AdEspressoTargeting Custom Audiences in AdEspresso is very similar to how it's done in Facebook. When defining your campaign’s target at Step 3 (in the "Interests" section), open the "Advanced options" box. You’ll find two distinct fields: One to select the Custom Audiences you want to target, and one for those you want to exclude.
To help you get the most out of your advertising dollars, AdEspresso also allows you to perform a split test on your audiences. This way, a set of ads will be created for each Custom Audience you’re targeting. This will give you detailed statistics on the effectiveness and CPA of each one.
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Chapter Seven7 IDEAS TO BOOST YOUR CAMPAIGNS WITH CUSTOM AUDIENCES7
Now that you know how to create and use Custom Audiences, it’s time to switch from theory to practice. Custom Audiences are a powerful tool, and using them can make the difference between wasting your advertising dollars and building a money-making campaign that lasts.
To begin experimenting with Custom Audiences, here’s a list of the seven top strategies used directly by the AdEspresso team or our customers to get amazing results from Facebook Ads.
1) Reach users who are not reading your emailsThough it's frustrating, a lot of the people receiving your emails aren't even opening them. This doesn't necessarily mean they don’t like your product or service. For some reason they've just stopped noticing your messages. If you have something really important to announce, export (or Data Sync) your list of email subscribers who didn't open your latest emails and try to reach them through Facebook Advertising instead. Most email services allow you to segment and export lists based on who's opened your recent emails.
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2) Regain lost customers How many times have you discovered a great site only to forget about it later? This clearly happens often, even if you’ve bought a great product. This may be the case for your old customers, as well. To solve this, create a Custom Audience with a list of all the people who have bought something from you in the past, but haven’t bought anything recently, and target them with ads about your new
products. They already know and trust you since they've purchased from you in the past. Leverage this! Remind them that they’ve done business
with you in the past, and maybe offer them a sweet deal since they are long time customers.For these kinds of campaigns, craft a very direct
and friendly message. Use your brand in thepicture or in the title. These users will recognize and trust your brand.Here’s a nice example from a great marketer, Neil Patel. He knows I already visited his blog andsubscribed to his email list, so he boldly uses his name and picture in the ad to get my attentionand boost my trust.
3) Target people very similar to your customers This tactic is perfect to get new customers without going crazy figuring out how old are they, where they live or what interests they have. Let Facebook figure it out! Create a Custom Audience with the emails or Facebook User IDs of your customers. Then create a Lookalike Audience from that list, optimizing for similarity. You don’t need 10,000,000 users. Anything between 100,000 and 500,000 will be
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more than enough. The important thing is that they are as similar as possible to our customers.Once the Lookalike Audience is ready, target these new prospects with a presentation of your service or product.
4) Grow your Facebook page likes In your product is a long-term asset that every serious business should seek. Custom Audiences can be a cheap way to have your contacts like your page. Simply create a Facebook Ads campaign targeted to a Custom Audience containing all your contacts.To avoid wasting money, exclude all of your existing Page fans from your targeting options. They've already liked your Page and typically won’t add value. 5) Get personal targeting by name If you have a big contact list complete with the contact’s first names, you could create an audience for each of the most popular names such as John, James, Richard, etc.Once you’ve made an audience for each of the most popular names, create an ad containing their name.
BONUS TIP #1
If you’re advertising on Facebook to generate new leads or grow your mailing list, always remember
to create an updated Custom Audience with all the contacts you already have. Then, exclude this audience from your advertising. You don’t want
to waste money by targeting ads at people you’re already in contact with.
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The ads should read something like this: “Hey James, a special offer just for you." This tactic usually has a big impact and drives high Click Through Rates. However, it may be abit too creepy for your more privacy-concerned customers. If you try it out, be sure to monitorcomments on your News Feed Ads and pull the plug if there are too many complaints.
6) Upsell products or upgrades As this guide has already mentioned, it’s easier to sell to someone who has already bought from you than to a total stranger. Custom Audiences make it extremely simple to get your customer to buy more. Create Custom Audiences of people who have bought from you, segmented by product category or kind.
BONUS TIP #2
Looking for new sources to feed your Custom Audiences? There’s a place where you have lots of email addresses of people highly related to your
industry: LinkedIn!
It’s also super simple to export all your contacts' emails in a .csv file. Just go into your contacts
settings page and click on “Export LinkedIn Connections” in the right column -- or try accessing it
directly here.
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7) From Web to Mobile & vice-versaNowadays, many businesses rely both on a website and a mobile app. Facebook CustomAudiences can be a great way to move users from one platform to the other, making sure you can reach your customers everywhere.
Simply create two audiences -- one with just your website users and one with the mobileadvertiser IDs of the mobile users. Then create two campaigns: one mobile app install campaignto have your website users install your mobile application, the other allowing your mobile users to access your website where it may be easier to close a sale.
WARNING!
Many Facebook advertising guides about Custom Audiences note ad-hoc software that crawls
Facebook’s Pages and Groups, saving the Facebook User IDs of fans and group members for targeting
purposes. This technique is extremely effective. So, why are we not discussing it here?
Because it violates Facebook’s Terms & Conditions. No matter how effective it is, it may get you in trouble and your account may be banned. Use
it at your own risk!
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Chapter EightDOING MORE WITH ADESPRESSO
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If you’re an AdEspresso user -- click here to sign up for a 14 day free trial -- you’ll have access to some tasty additional features so you can play with Custom Audiences and get the most out of them. AdEspresso also has exclusive features to make your advertising even smarter. When creating an Audience from "Tools → Custom Audiences", we have additional options not available in Facebook Ads Manager or Power Editor. Let’s check it out!
Æ
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Video Engagement Custom Audiences
When you create an ad with a video, you’ll be able to create custom audiences of everyone who viewed the video or just a percentage of the video!
You can do video advertising, just to engage users to get them to know your brand. This can now be it’s own custom audience, that you can send to your sales page, an e-book, or a more traditional ad! As of this writing (May 2016), this engagement targeting is exclusive to AdEspresso!
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Lead Ads Engagement Custom Audiences
As a marketer, we’re sure you know of Facebook’s Lead Ads - we even introduced it in Chapter 2. But did you know that AdEspresso has the ability to target those people who opened your Lead Ad, but didn’t convert?
They almost gave you their phone or email...but something stopped them. With our highly niche re-targeting, you can target them again with another Lead Ad, or even a more traditional ad that takes them to a submission form on a landing page!
Thank you for reading! If you liked this ebook please share it:
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