Here’s everything that you want to know about a custom audience for social media ads!
The cost of social media advertising is increasing day by day.
So marketers can’t afford to lose prospects to poor onboarding flows or leaky sales funnels.
Though social media advertising costs are skyrocketing, it doesn’t mean marketers are powerless.
Marketers can turn to Custom Audiences to combat the rising costs of social media advertising. A Custom audience for social media ads can help them optimize their ads and get great ROI.
In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at what Custom Audiences are all about and how you can use them for your brand. Let’s get started!
Introduction to custom audience for social media ads
A Custom audience on social media is an ad targeting option that allows you to find existing audiences among people across Meta technologies.
To create custom audiences of people who already know your business, you can use sources such as:
- Customer lists
- Website or app traffic
- Engagement across Meta technologies
There are different types of custom audiences that you can create:
- Website Custom Audiences
- App activity Custom Audience
- Customer list Custom Audience
- Engagement Custom Audiences
You can create up to 500 Custom Audiences per ad account.
And then you have lookalike audiences. When you’re ready to grow your business, you can use Custom Audiences to create lookalike audiences. A Lookalike Audience is a list of people targeted for advertising who are similar (or “look like”) to people currently interacting with your business.
What are the benefits of a custom audience for social media ads?
The benefits of creating custom audiences are many. Let’s take a look at some of them:
1. High conversion rate and ROI
Custom Audiences allow you to target your ad campaigns and ad sets to reach only those most likely to be interested in your product or service. When your ad is shown to people who are actually interested, it leads to higher conversion rates and ROI
2. Create highly personalized ads
Custom Audiences help you create highly personalized ads that directly address the needs and interests of your target audience. By knowing your audience better, you can create ads that engage them deeper and achieve your business goals.
Gain a deeper understanding of your audience through social listening platforms like Radarr. You can find out what topics they are interested in, what language they use, and what content resonates with them.
3. Track and measure results
Tracking and measuring ad results is much more effective with a custom audience in social media. Knowing who your target market is and who you’re targeting specifically with your ads, makes it easier to track performance.
How to Create Custom Audiences for Facebook and Instagram Ads
Facebook and Instagram ads are integrated into Facebook Ads Manager. You can directly run all your ads and create and manage all your audiences from here.
There are different Custom Audiences you can create on Facebook. Let’s look at some of them.
1. A customer list – also known as a standard custom audience
This is an audience based on a list of emails, phone numbers, or Facebook IDs. Facebook uses this data to match its user list. You’ll typically find that it can match 60-70% of the contacts on your customer list.
2. Website custom audience
Instead of uploading a list of your customers’ email addresses and phone numbers, you can build your audience based on traffic to your website. To do this, you must make sure that your Facebook pixel has been integrated into your website code. Reach out to your website developer for the same!
Once your Facebook pixel is integrated, everyone who visits your website will be tracked. Each event can be tracked using this option, such as product view, wishlist, add to cart, checkout, contact us, and sign in. Create Custom Audiences for your website later based on these events for highly personalized ads.
For example, you can run a campaign to reach users who visited your product page but didn’t purchase, encouraging them to return to your website and complete the purchase.
3. App activity based custom audiences
If you happen to have a mobile app or game, you can build audiences based on the actions that people take within your product.
To reach users who perform specific actions in your app (called “app events”), through Facebook & Instagram ads, you need to set up app events. This is done by implementing the SDK, which will enable you to pass app event data from your app to Facebook.
You can track any events using this option, such as anyone who opened the app, most active users, and users by purchase amount. Later, based on these events, you can create Custom Audiences to run highly personalized ads.
4. Offline activity based Facebook audience
Based on offline research through in-store conversations, you can collect information in a spreadsheet and build your audience around it.
5. Facebook and Instagram engagement
This audience is based on people interacting with your post, video, event or profile on Facebook & Instagram. You can also set a time frame to narrow your search. For example, you can customize the period to focus on engagements in the last 90 days or the last year.
How to Create Custom Audiences for Pinterest Ads
No other social networks are quite as robust with ad-focused offerings as Facebook and Instagram, but there is still plenty of customization you can control on other sites as well. Here are some of the options for creating custom audiences for Pinterest ads:
- Based on visitors who went to your site
- Through a customer list that you upload — like a list of emails
- Based on people who engaged with pins that link to your website
- With an actalike audience that behaves similarly to an existing custom audience that you’ve created
The visitor audience is based on a Pinterest tag, very much like the Facebook pixel. The Pinterest tag is a piece of JavaScript code you can install on your website to gather conversion insights and to build audiences that you can then target, based on actions taken on your site.
For Pinterest engagement audiences you need to confirm your domain with Pinterest, and then Pinterest will be able to check to see which Pinterest users have engaged with pins that link back to your website.
Similar to the Facebook and Instagram engagement audiences, Pinterest gives you a handful of options to further customize this group. You can filter based on a specific URL, based on a pin category, or even based on the percentage of video that’s been viewed.
Note: Your eCommerce brand can use this to create audiences interested in specific product categories (people clicking on specific links or specific pins).
How to Create Custom Audiences for Twitter
Here are all options to create Custom Audiences on Twitter :
- Upload list of contacts or customers
- A collection of website visitors based on data captured using the Twitter website tag
- List of mobile app users who have taken specific actions on the app
- Flexible audience
Note: The Flexible Audiences feature is to an extent similar to Engagement Audiences. This allows Twitter advertisers to store audience combinations and audience subsets based on factors such as recency and frequency of interactions.
How to Create Custom Audiences for LinkedIn
A custom Audience on Linkedin is also known as Matched Audience. Matched Audiences is a suite of targeting features designed to help you reach your target audience, including people you already know, using existing or past customer data with:
- Website Retargeting
- Retargeting by Video and Lead Gen Forms
- Contact Targeting
- Company List Targeting
Website Retargeting
Website retargeting allows you to create an audience based on the pages visited on your website and re-engage your visitors with content related to the pages they viewed. You must add the LinkedIn Insights tag to your website’s global footer to gather the actions taken by visitors on your website.
Retargeting by Video and Lead Gen Forms
With Video retargeting and Lead Gen forms, you can reach people who are actively interested in your brand based on previous actions on your ad. This action can be watching part or all of a 15-second video ad or opening a Lead Gen Form from your Sponsored Content ad.
Company List Targeting
Company targeting with Matched Audiences allows you to run account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns by matching your list of target businesses over 8 million LinkedIn pages.
Contact Targeting
Contact targeting lets you connect your contacts to build custom audiences by connecting your contact management platform or securely uploading a list of email addresses. Here you can show ads to a list of leads based on their stage in the sales funnel.
LinkedIn has an ecosystem of marketing partners who have built audience integrations.
For a complete list of Audience Partners, you can visit Linkedin Partner Directory. Alternatively, you can upload a CSV file containing the list of email addresses directly to the campaign manager.
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are great for selling products and services directly to consumers. However, if your business sells to other businesses, you can do many interesting things with LinkedIn.
Tips to make the most of your custom audiences
Here are some tips that can instantly improve the effectiveness of your Custom Audiences on social media.
1. Don’t forget videos
Remember that videos can be a very useful indicator of engagement and attention. Let’s say you created an audience of users who watched a certain number of videos on your page. You can do two things with this audience –
- Retarget audience who have watched 100%, 75%, 50%, or 25% of these videos.
- Create lookalike audiences of people, who watched the videos, with similar behaviors.
2. Improve your engagement-based audience
When building your custom audience based on Instagram engagement, keep the following in mind:
- People who have interacted with your brand on Instagram in any way in the last 7, 30, 60, 90 or 180 days.
- People who have visited your Instagram profile in the last 30, 60, 90 or 180 days but are not customers.
- People who watched your Instagram Stories in the last 7 days.
3. Retargeting
Another way to use Custom Audiences is retargeting. Here we are talking about pixel tracking and website or profile visits.
Remember that starting a retargeting campaign doesn’t mean targeting everyone visiting your website. This approach is not entirely effective.
Why?
Buyers visit different pages of your website for different reasons. Some may not want to buy at all. The pages they visit represent different buyer intents. The key is to align your Custom Ad Audiences with those intents.
For example, if you’re an e-commerce brand and someone comes to your site to buy skin care, segment them into Custom Audiences labeled “Skin Care” or “Beauty Products.”
4. Attract your existing audience
Acquiring more customers is not the only purpose of social media advertising. With a creative mindset, it can be a way to retain existing customers.
For example, there may be many people who have purchased or used your product in the past but haven’t repurchased in a while. Why not make a custom audience list of those buyers and reach out to them? This can also be an effective way to ask for feedback from your past customers.
5. Newsletter subscribers
You can also do a few things with a Custom Audience of newsletter subscribers. You can create lists of interested and uninterested subscribers. Create Custom Audiences based on these lists and serve different content to each group.
6. Use social listening tools
Social listening tools provide the analytics behind your social media performance and help you understand where you stand on social platforms.
You can then use relevant social media KPIs to strategically align your social media efforts and develop the optimal advertising strategy.
Explore platforms like Radarr to improve social media advertising and create better custom audiences with social listening.
Now build a custom audience for social media ads that convert!
Advertising on social media can quickly become costly, so you must target your ads to users who are more likely to convert. Custom Audience, therefore, provides an opportunity to target and segment potential customers with laser-like accuracy. With thousands of ways to reach your customers, you’ll never get tired of creating new custom audiences and watching them convert.
However, there are problems with such a wide range of customization options. Today it’s too complicated, and most marketers settle for demographic targeting or simple remarketing scripts. This is where you start exploring social listening tools like Radarr.
Radarr allows you to build audience intelligence, giving you the ‘accurate’ information to reach and engage your audience through your campaigns. Isn’t building audience intelligence on top of Custom Audiences a win-win situation?
