How To Create An Audience In Ads Manager

With its 2.19 billion monthly active users, Facebook provides a huge potential audience to businesses. One of the core strengths of Facebook is its granular targeting, and this is the reason 3 million businesses run Facebook Ads. In 2012, Facebook launched its Custom Audiences tool to further help businesses to reach users that are likely to be interested in their businesses.

In this article, you will learn all you need to know about Facebook Custom Audiences and creative ways to use it to enhance the profitability of your campaigns.

What are Facebook Custom Audiences?

The Facebook Custom Audiences tool is a powerful targeting tool you can use to laser target your ads to show to potential customers that are likely to convert.

The Custom Audiences list comprises people that have shown interest in your business. They are those from your CRMs, visitors to your website, app and email subscribers, customers from your retail store, etc. These are audiences you can show your adverts to because they are likely to convert. You can also add or remove people who have carried out specific actions from the Custom Audiences. For instance, you can exclude people who have recently subscribed to your app. This will ensure that you are not advertising to the wrong set of people, wasting your ad spend.

With Custom Audiences, you can also create a lookalike audience to get new customers that look like your best customers, thereby maximizing the ROI of your campaigns.

Below are four distinct benefits of Facebook Custom Audiences.

Benefits of using Facebook Custom Audiences

There are many ways Facebook Custom Audiences can help you get good results from your ad campaigns. Below are five of them, together with case studies to help you understand the impact of Custom Audiences on your campaigns.

1. It generates more qualified leads at a lower cost

Facebook Custom Audiences is a great tool you can use to generate more qualified leads at a lower cost for your business. You can do this by retargeting those who have previously shown interest in your business but did not make a purchase.

A good case study of a company that got leads and sales by using Custom Audiences for retargeting their visitors is McCarthy & Stone — a UK developer and manager of retirement communities.

They were looking for ways to generate leads and sales from their ads. They used Custom Audiences for retargeting ads to people who have been to their websites.

They got4.3x more sales leads, 2x lower cost per lead for prospecting campaigns and retargeting campaigns.

2. It drives quality traffic to your website

Facebook Custom Audiences can help to increase your website traffic. An example of a company that achieved this feat is Favi, an online one-stop furniture shop. The company used Facebook tools and Custom Audiences to drive traffic, increase sales and raise brand awareness.

They achieved a 2.6x increase in website traffic, 2.1x increase in people reached and 600,000 people were reached daily.

3. It drives in-store visits

With the Facebook Custom Audiences, you can retarget customers who have bought things in your offline store or engage with your services.

Louis Vuitton used Facebook's store traffic ad objective with Custom Audiences to reach potential customers when they are close to a store.

The ad brought in13,000 store visits, 742,000 people reached, and â‚¬1.26 cost per lead.

4.It Increases mobile app installs

If you have an app for your business, you can use Custom Audiences to increase your app installs by targeting the right audience with your ad. This is seen in the results obtained by the mobile app called the Washmen — a leading UAE app-based laundry service. They run a Facebook mobile app ad campaign to increase their mobile app installs and brand awareness.

They used a combination of Facebook ad tools with Custom Audiences to get a 3x increase in weekly sign-ups, 70% of mobile app registrations, 2x increase in sales.

Types of Facebook Custom Audiences

There are five major types of Custom Audiences available for advertisers. They are:

Website Custom Audiences
Customer list Custom Audiences
App activity Custom Audiences
Offline activity Custom Audiences
Engagement Custom Audiences

However, here, we will concentrate on the Website traffic and Customer list.

1. Custom Audiences based on website activity (pixel)

Custom Audiences allow you to build an audience of website visitors who came to your website from different sources. You can segment them based on their actions on your website, such as the specific pages they viewed. For example, when a visitor comes to your website and clicks on a product to view it but did not make a purchase, the Facebook Pixel on your website will track their actions, and you can use the data to create a Custom Audience that you can convince to buy from you.

But before you can do this, you need to install the Facebook Pixel on your website.

What is Facebook Pixel?

The Facebook Pixel is a tracking code that follows your website visitors around your website and sends the data back to Facebook. With this pixel, Facebook has quality information about the website visitors that you can use to create Custom Audiences to target them with ads.

For example, I searched for a blog post on our website blog — Leadsbridge.com, and read an article. I went to Facebook afterward and saw a retargeting ad. Check it out below.

This is how to retarget visitors with relevant Facebook Ads.

How to create Facebook Custom Audiences (with Facebook Pixel)

The first thing you need to do before you create Custom Audiences for your website is to create the Facebook Pixel. To do that follow the steps below:

Login to your Facebook account
Click on the Ads manager
Under the " Measure & Report ", click on "pixels"

4. This will take you to the event manager's page as shown below. Click on "create a pixel".

5. Name your pixel and enter your website URL in the spaces provided.

6. Click " Continue" when you are done.

The next thing to do is to add the Facebook Pixel to your website.

How to Install the pixel on your website

There are three ways to install the Facebook Pixel on your website:

Use an integration or tag manager
Manually add pixel code to your website
Email instructions to a developer.

1. Use an integration or tag manager

If you are not comfortable installing the code directly on your website, you can use a partner integration. To do that, follow the steps below:
Click on"Use a partner integration"
Choose a partner from the list such as Magento, Segment, Shopify, Google Tag Manager, Wix, Squarespace, etc.
Follow the instructions to set it up.

2. Manually add the pixel code to a website

To manually install the pixel on your website, follow the steps below.

Click on "Manually upload the code yourself "
Copy the "pixel code" from the page displayed
On your website, search for the "header template" in your CMS or web platform
Paste the code at the bottom of the "header section," directly above the closing head tag.
Add "events "
Click "test events" to make sure you set it up properly. If the status reads " active," then it is working.

3. Email instructions to your Developer

If you have a website manager or developer that takes care of your website, you can email them the code to help set up your pixel. Follow the steps below to do it.

Click on "email instructions to a developer "
Put in the recipient's "email address"
Click "send "

Now that you know how to create the Facebook Pixel and also install it on your website, it is time to create a Custom Audience for it.

How to create a Custom Audience for website visitors

To create an audience for your website visitors on Facebook, follow the steps below:

Log into your Facebook account and go to the "ads manager"
Click on the 'Ads Manager ' menu and click on ' Audiences'

3. Click on "Create audience" and then click on "Custom Audience"

4. In the next window, choose the audience you want to create i.e., Website

5. Choose whether toinclude people who meetany or allof the criteria you will set below

6. Choose the "people you want to target." For example, you can target three categories of website visitors i.e.

All website visitors within a specific period
People who visited specific web pages
Visitors by time spent

7. Select as appropriate and name your audience

8. When you are done, click on " create audience "

2. Custom Audiences based on CRM segments

The customer file contains a list of people who have interacted with your business. They are your newsletter subscribers, customers, etc. You already have their details, such as their email and/or phone numbers stored on your CRM or auto-responder. All you need is to download it as a CSV file and upload custom audience to Facebook, and it will create a Custom Audience based on the details.

How to create Facebook Custom Audiences (based on your CRM data)

To create a Custom Audience for your customer list, follow the steps below:

Download the CSV file of the leads/customers you want to reach from your CRM or auto-responder
From theads Manager , click on audiences

3. Select "C reate Audience," " Custom Audiences"

4. Click on "C ustomer list"

5. Click on " Add from your own list "

6. This is where you will upload yourCSV file from your CRM or Auto-responder. Here, you can do it in two ways,upload manually oruse automation. You can use LeadsBridge's Custom Audiences Sync tool to sync your CRM or Auto-responder with Facebook to create a Custom Audience for your customer list. More on that below.

To upload it manually, select theoriginal data source drop-down to specify where you got the data from, then upload this list as atxt or CSV file or copy and paste the data in the content field.

7. Name your audience and select " next ."

8. Edit and upload your data — Check your data to ensure all of them are classified accordingly. If they are not, edit them to match.

9. When you are done,upload custom audience to Facebook. Facebook will harsh the data, upload it, and create your Custom Audiences from it. When it is done, click on "Done" to finish the process.

3. App Activity Custom Audiences

As described by Facebook themselves, creating an app activity audience is one of the ideal ways to target groups of people who are most likely to take the action that you want them to take on your app.

Using the Facebook SDK, you can easily and seamlessly pass data to Facebook from your app. You can then use that data to filter who you want to include with your targeted ads and custom audience.

A good example would be using the Traffic or Conversion objective to conduct an ad engagement campaign for your app. If this is the case, you might find that your ads perform better for those who have already installed and use your app.

Before you begin with creating app activity custom audiences, there are two things that you have to do:

Register your app
Set up Facebook SDK and log app events on the Facebook for developers site

Once those two steps are done, creating app activity custom audiences is as simple as 8 steps. According to Facebook, those 8 steps are as follows:

Navigate to Audiences at the Ad Set level in Ads Manager

2. Once there, select the Create New button

3. In the drop-down menu, click on Custom Audience

4. Select App Activity

5. In the new drop-down menu, select which audience you'd like to base your custom audience on

6. Add details to the app events that you're basing your audience on. To do so, click Refine by and then select your details

7. Name the audience

8. Click Create Audience to finish

Once these 8 short steps are complete, the audience is ready to be used immediately. Have some patience, though, as it may take a few hours to pre-populate.

4. Offline Activity Custom Audiences

Offline Activity Custom Audiences are essential to accurately tracking customers who make their final purchases in an offline setting. The audience will constantly refresh based on offline events and data that took place within the last 180 days and uploaded within the timeframe that you specify.

By creating an offline activity custom audience, you can exclude customers who have recently bought something offline in order to target new customers. Once you've created the Offline Activity Custom Audience, you can also create a Lookalike Audience to target those who are similar to your customers and have already had interactions with your business.

Setting up Offline Activity custom Audiences is fairly simple and only takes about six steps. This is what you need to do to get started:

Navigate to Events Manager just like before. Facebook specifies here that if you have more than one account, make sure that you select your desired account

2. Once there, select offline events set

3. Click on Create and chooseCreate Custom Audience in the drop-down menu

4. Select your ad account, then click Next

5. Select/create parameters so you can choose who to include and exclude based on interaction activity

6. Name the Offline Activity Custom Audience, and select Create audience

Creating a Lookalike Audience is the best way to reach out to new potential customers. Because these Lookalikes are similar to customers that you've already converted, they will be more likely to convert, too.

5. Engagement Custom Audiences

An Engagement Custom Audience targets users who have engaged with your brand across the Facebook family of tools, apps, and services.

These "engagements" can be targeted based on viewing videos, clicking on Facebook pages, or opening a form in a lead generation ad. Based on these actions, you can show your ads to relevant people who are already somewhat familiar with your brand.

There are seven Engagement Custom Audience types available:

Video
Lead Form
Shopping
Events
Instant Experience
Instagram Account
Facebook page

It's important to keep in mind that Engagement Custom Audiences are different than Custom Audiences from your website. Although they target a similar audience, Engagement Custom Audiences focuses exclusively on the Facebook family of tools, apps, and services.

How to automate your Custom Audiences building with LeadsBridge

Do you know it is possible to sync your CRM databases such as Agile CRM, Bitrix24, Freshsales, and HubSpot with the Facebook Custom Audiences using LeadsBrigde's Custom Audiences Sync tool?

When you sync your CRM or auto-responder with the Facebook Custom Audiences through LeadsBridge, the list is updated automatically. With it, you can upload your customers' list directly to Facebook. It will automatically create the Custom Audiences from your list. That means you don't have to worry about uploading manually and mismatching data.

Also, if you have new visitors signing up daily, you don't have to keep uploading the file manually every day; LeadsBridge refreshes every 6 hours to keep the list updated.

About Facebook Customer Lifetime Value

Facebook defined Customer lifetime value as "a numeric representation of the net profit you predict will be attributable to a given customer over the duration of your relationship with them. "

Source: Kissmetrics

In order words, a customer lifetime value is the amount of money a customer spends with your business before they stop. It is more profitable to keep existing customers than to acquire new ones. Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Not only that, but the success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%.

This metric is key to making important business decisions. To know your customer lifetime value, you need to use some calculations.

How to calculate the Customer Lifetime Value

The formula for Customer Lifetime Value isCustomer value x Customer's average lifespan.

The customer value is determined by finding the average order value and multiplying it with the purchase frequency.

Customer value = Average order value x Purchase frequency

Average order value

This is the total average of how much a customer spends on your website with each new order made. It is calculated over one year:

Total revenue x number of orders = Average order value

2. Purchase frequency

This is the number of times a customer makes purchases from your business in a given time. The purchase frequency is calculated over one year by:

Number of orders x unique customers =Purchase frequency

For instance, if you have 500 orders in 2018 and 350 unique customers, the purchase frequency will be 500 x 350 = 75,000.

So, theCustomer Value = average order value x purchase frequency.

3. Customer Average Lifespan

A customer's average lifespan is the average time a customer stays with your business before they leave or become inactive. It is the most difficult to calculate. It depends on the business you run. For example, if you sell items that people buy just once, such as a house, the lifetime will be shorter. But if you sell items that people regularly need, such as clothes, it will be a long lifetime. However, Avinash Kaushik from Shopify recommends 1-3 years to be a good lifespan for a customer to be active.

The formula for theCustomer lifetime value = customer value x customer average lifespan.

Multiplying the Customer Lifetime Value by how long a customer stays with your business gives an accurate value for each customer.

How to use the Facebook Customer Lifetime Value to create value-based audiences

Facebook Customer Lifetime Value is especially useful for creating value-based audiences. A value-based audience, according to Facebook, is "a value associated with your customers based on how much and how often they spend with your business over the course of their relationship with you."

Normally a custom audience is used to create a Lookalike Audience, which helps to find similar people to your customers. But the value-based audience takes it a step further using the Customer Lifetime Value to create a Value-based Lookalike Audience comprising your most valuable customers. To create the Value-based Lookalike Audience, all you need is to add a Customer Lifetime Value column to the CSV file you want to upload to create a custom audience. You can learn how to create the Facebook LTV custom audience by clicking here.

How to create an automatic audience with LTV

LeadsBridge is a Facebook Marketing Partner that integrates over 370 CRMs with Facebook. One such integration tool is the Custom Audience sync. With this tool, you can automatically create an audience by syncing Facebook with your CRM, which calculates the Facebook Customer Lifetime Value of the listed customers.

Creating automatic Facebook LTV Custom Audiences will save time and effort since it avoids advertisers having to manually upload custom audiences to Facebook over and over again. The Custom Audience Sync tool also helps to keep your Lifetime Value Audience lists on Facebook updated regularly whenever someone buys.

Below is how to create an automatic Facebook LTV Custom Audience using LeadsBridge's Custom Audience Sync tool.

Before you start, connect your CRM in the integration area shown below.

There are four steps involved in creating a custom audience through LeadsBridge:

Destination
Settings
Sources
Summary

1. Destination

A. Log into your LeadsBridge account and click on " Facebook suite "

B. Select " custom audiences ." If you have custom audiences available, choose the appropriate one. If not, click on " Add New " to add a new audience.

C. Select the " Facebook Ad account " you want to use for the " Custom Audience ." If there are no accounts added, simply click on the " Add Ad Account " button and click " next ."

2. Settings

The next step is the settings.

Facebook custom audiences

In this section, you can either create new custom audiences or use an existing one on your Facebook. Here, we will build a new audience and name it " test audience." Next is the interval time, which depends on the volume of traffic you have. For example, if you choose a 24-hour or 6-hour, LeadsBridge will sync the new records back to Facebook. The function also will help you remove a contact that has been unsubscribed from your list in the CRM.

The next option is Value-based. This is for the Lifetime Value of your client's lead. It enables you to create a value-based lookalike audience. To activate it, click the button and switch it to "Yes." The audience will consist of people similar to your highest valued customer.

In case you need to use a specific event value, you can also switch it on. Otherwise, you can leave it.

3. Sources

Here, you will define the lead source. In the same bridge, you can add multiple sources, multiple CRM, email marketing tools, different kinds of lists, and even create sub-segment using some function here. So. Click on " browse " to select your preferred source.

Facebook custom audiences

Here, we will use HubSpot as an example with the right integration.Here, we will use HubSpot as an example with the right integration.

In the next screen, select the right segment where the leads or the contacts are stored on HubSpot (or the preferred CRM).In the next screen, select the right segment where the leads or the contacts are stored on HubSpot (or the preferred CRM).

In the next step, match the fields from your system to the Facebook field. Ensure that it is done correctly.In the next step, match the fields from your system to the Facebook field. Ensure that it is done correctly.

Then click on " next "

In the next step, it will show the software/platform you've just added.

If you have multiple audience sources, click on the " add another source " button to include it. Here, we will add another audience source — MailChimp and click on " next ". Choose the right list for the account.

Facebook custom audiences

Match the fields accordingly and click on " next ".

On the next screen, you will see the two audiences you added to the account as shown below.

Facebook custom audiences

You can add more lists by clicking on " Add another source ." When you are done, click on " next "

4. Summary

This is the last step before you go live. Here, you can simulate the bridge. There are options when you run it on assimilation mode.

Click on " Publish " to run the simulation. This will help you see the last execution, the day, the time the contact has been synced or deleted. It will show you if there are any errors, as shown below.

Facebook custom audiences

When you click on " history " of the custom audience you just created, it takes you to a page where you can see all details such as the execution date, duration, status, sync errors, etc. Here, you can adjust the errors to make it right before you publish it.

Facebook custom audiences

Here is the video of a step-by-step method to create a Facebook LTV Custom Audience with LeadsBridge.

Facebook Conversion API

Although we've talked about it extensively, Facebook Conversion API is also worth mentioning in this article, simply because of its usefulness when it comes to tracking conversions across all audiences.

CAPI, as it's called, is a quick solution for all of the data privacy issues everyone is facing. With the rise in third-party data regulations, everyone has basically been forced to become GDPR and CCPA compliant. Although this isn't a bad thing (after all, everyone deserves their privacy), it certainly has put a damper on a lot of businesses and their marketing plans.

CAPI has become the go-to solution for countless businesses as it's quick to set up and it's easily integrated with your CRM or other marketing tools.

We provide an intuitive yet simple solution for making that connection. It only takes a few clicks! Once the bridge has been made, you never have to worry about it again, avoiding the need to manually and repetitively download and upload CSV files.

5 Creative ways to Use Facebook Custom Audiences to Boost your Campaigns

Are you searching for ways to boost your success with Facebook Ads using Custom Audiences? Below are five creative ways you can use Facebook Custom Audiences to boost your ad campaigns.

1.Exclude current customers from seeing your ads

You can use Custom Audiences to exclude your current customers from seeing your Facebook Ads. For instance, you can exclude the customers who have purchased your product in the past from seeing your product ads. You can do this by uploading the list of your customers and use it as a negative list, so you don't waste money advertising to users who are your current customers.

Irish Tax rebates created a Facebook ad to help drive people to a landing page where they can fill out an inquiry form. To do this, they set a broad target to reach many people in Ireland and created a website Custom Audience to exclude people who had used their service.

The results?

They got a 2.5x increase in sales and a 50% decrease in cost acquisition.

2.Set up Up-selling and back-end offers

The Facebook Custom Audiences helps you to build audiences of people who are in specific stages of your sales funnel, so you can show them the perfect offer that will lead to conversions.

For example, you can:

Show front-end offer to prospects that sign up to your email list
When the prospect converts, show them up-sell offers
When they buy the up-sell offers, show them the back-end offers.

Apart from that, you can also set up a dynamic Custom Audience building system. This involves defining a Custom Audience from a thank-you page after each goal. i.e., one for your prospects, one for potential customers who need a demo, and one for clients. When you do this, it will be easy to move 5% or 10% more prospects to the next stage of your sales funnel with a small retargeting spend.

See an example from LeadsBridge below.

3. Use Custom Audiences to retarget website visitors

Retargeting on Facebook means targeting your website visitors over and over again until they convert. It is a powerful marketing tool and one of the best ways to attract leads and customers to your business.

Retargeting works like this: Facebook gives you a code or pixel to install on your website. The code stores the information about your website visitors and follows them as they move to other websites or social media networks on the internet, showing them relevant ads.

Since you have installed the Facebook Pixel on your website, you can get the information of customers who have visited specific pages on your website and create a Custom Audience from them. Target them with ads about products they viewed but did not buy. This technique also works for visitors who abandoned their shopping carts.

The Spearmint love, infant clothing, and accessory brand ran Facebook Ads for some time and conducted a retargeting campaign with the audience data collected by the Facebook Pixel over time. They set up a Custom Audience list based on visitors who came to the website in the last 60 days but did not make any purchase. They created dynamic ads to bring the visitors back to their website and shop.

The results?

They got a 14.2x return on ad spends with a cost conversion of $0.11.

4.Set up a Facebook Custom Audience with CLV/LTV

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the amount of money a customer is willing to spend on a business before they leave. The more a customer buys from you, the more money you make.Peter Drucker said, "The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer." This is the total summation of what CLV means.

Customer Lifetime Value helps you to increase revenue without acquiring new customers. Marketing metrics reported that there is a 5-20% probability that you will sell your product or service to a new customer, but the chance of selling to an existing customer is about 60-70%.

The formula for calculating your customer lifetime value is:

Average transaction + annual purchase frequency + expected years of relationship = Customer lifetime value.

Knowing your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) will help you make important decisions about sales, marketing, customer support, and product development.

You can use Customer Lifetime Value as a metric to create lookalike audiences on Facebook that target only your best customers.

Custom Audiences Common questions

There are common questions that people ask about Custom Audiences, below are three of them.

1.What is Facebook Custom Audiences' privacy?

If you want to use the Facebook Custom Audiences tool, ensure you comply with the applicable terms. Two of the policies are:

Show people the origin of the audience information. This is especially useful if you are uploading a customer file. You need to indicate where you got the information.
Ensure you have permission to use and share people's data.

Check out this link to learn more.

Additionally, we've gone over GDPR and Facebook regulations in another article posted on our blog. Since privacy laws are changing, it's definitely worth a read.

2.Do Facebook Custom Audiences auto-update?

Yes. Custom Audiences from your website updates automatically as users who fall within the rules specified for website users. For example, if you set a rule to include people who visited your website in the last 30 days, it will automatically add people who have been to your website in the last 30 days.

However, if the audiences come from your CRM or Email software, there is a need to manually update them by downloading and uploading CSV file regularly. But to avoid the stress and time wastage in manual updating, you can automatically sync your CRM or Email software with your Facebook account through LeadsBridge's Custom Audiences Sync tool. It helps to ensure that the leads in your customers' file are properly and automatically synced to your custom audiences, reducing the possibility of data points mismatch.

3.What is the Facebook Custom Audiences minimum size?

The Facebook Custom Audiences minimum size is 100 users.

Takeaway

Custom Audiences works best when combined with cold campaigns. This helps you to get better results. Also, you can use a retargeting campaign with a cold campaign.

Below are two success stories that will inspire you.

Facebook Custom Audiences Success Stories

1.Hyperbits Music

Hyperbits Music, a music school that deals with technical and creative aspects of music production, created Facebook Ads using a Custom Audience through LeadsBridge to help generate interest in the brand and products.

The ad generated qualified leads and lower cost per lead.

2.Turners Automotive Group

Turners Automotive Group is the largest used car network in New Zealand. They worked with LeadsBridge to create Facebook Ads (using Custom Audiences) that will deliver cost-effective lead generation.

The ad brought in +25% leads with -95% cost per lead.The ad brought in +25% leads with -95% cost per lead.

5 ways large companies can benefit from Custom Audiences Sync

When it comes to running Facebook Ads campaigns with specific Custom Audiences, large companies have access to a tremendous amount of data stored in their CRM to analyze to spot behavioral trends and identify different segments of leads and customers.

Each different segment can be addressed with a campaign that triggers the right buying impulses at the right time.

However, today many Marketing Departments still operate by uploading CSV files on Facebook to create Custom Audiences, but in order to really take advantage of the available data and running effective retargeting campaigns, timing and accuracy are key.

The information must flow freely from the CRM database to the Facebook Ads Manager, and that can be a problem, especially for large companies with strong hierarchic environments and several Managers whose responsibilities often overlap.

In this article, we presented 5 ways large companies can benefit from Custom Audiences Sync despite their structural challenges.

1. Create your campaigns faster by avoiding manual work

To develop a strong retargeting strategy, close collaboration among several departments is required. From the Marketing department who runs the campaigns to the Salespeople and the Customer Support who qualify the leads, to the Data Analyst who spots behavioral trends.

From approvals to sharing information, coordinating the work among departments already takes a lot of effort.

This leaves little room, if none at all, for repetitive, manual work.

Since effective retargeting campaigns depend entirely upon constantly updated CSV files, they need to be sync on the Facebook Ads Manager quite often. The best way to avoid manual upload is through marketing automation.

By having the CRM sync with the Facebook Manager account, as soon as a new subscriber enters a particular CRM segmentation or reaches a certain stage opportunity in the buying cycle, the information is updated automatically in the Custom Audience on Facebook.

Once a bridge is set, it won't require further operations, by keeping the work flowing and collaboration between departments efficient.

2. Create instant retargeting campaigns with updated CA

Everybody knows that to really build a retargeting strategy that grows sales, not only the Custom Audiences must be uploaded fast, but they constantly need to be updated with the latest data.

In the situation of omnichannel retailers such as Adidas or Nike, for example, the database of leads, customers, and segments is rearranged by the minute.

If the Custom Audiences are updated once or twice a week, if some of the leads become customers, as long as they stay in the same CA, they keep receiving ads as if they were still leads. This can result in a considerable loss of efficiency of the marketing message, as well as a misuse of the Marketing budget.

To maximize precision, it is better to update the audiences more frequently. Ideally, three or four times a day.

This task is impossible to be carried out manually. Not only it is overwhelming, but oftentimes — as said earlier — overlapping responsibilities between CRM Managers and Advertising Planner would add an extra layer of friction in the process.

The best way to maintain a high-quality shopping experience and increase profit margin is by having the Custom Audiences updated as often as every 6 hours with the latest information from the database.

3. Reduce the possibility of data points mismatch.

There is another aspect of retargeting campaigns that are often not considered, and that is the need to upload the customers' information precisely and flawlessly in the format that Facebook requires.

Creating a CSV file manually requires gathering the data, sorting them out in the proper columns, extract the file and then upload it on Facebook, although some CRM like f.e. Hubspot have the native option to easily extract the CSV ready to be uploaded.

The task of sorting the files correctly is not trivial. It's not possible to mistakenly put rows instead of columns, or separate values with commas instead of a semicolon. The file format needs to be consistent, and the margin for error is close to zero.

To decrease significantly the mismatching rate, it is better to access the data straight from their value fields in the CRM through an API script.

By enables companies to increase matching rate precision, the API script function is to keep the Custom Audiences clean all the time for effective retargeting campaigns.

4. Keep your ads' relevance score high.

Sometimes, in order to maximize the efficiency and quality of retargeting campaigns, instead of addressing specific segments of customers, advertisers can work the opposite way by excluding certain Custom Audiences.

For example, when creating retargeting campaigns for the website visitors, it's possible to tell Facebook to exclude all of the email contacts of those who have already completed a purchase and have been registered in the CRM. This technique is implemented by copying a snippet of code (pixel) on the website page confirming the transaction.

This helps to show ads to people who visited the website but are not registered in the CRM and avoid flooding customers who have already converted with further ads, keeping the Relevance Score high.

The Relevance Score is an indicator of ad performance. Usually, a higher score is associated with lower overall costs and more reach per dollar spent.

In other words, having strong Relevance Scores helps advertisers to enjoy more efficient ads distribution and lower costs.

5. Keep your LTV based Lookalike Audiences relevant.

Lookalike audiences are one of Facebook's targeting options. They are audiences that share similar traits and interests to customers or leads who already had some kind of interaction with a business, and they can lead to a growth in sales by 15%.

Implementing Lookalike Audiences in retargeting campaigns has become even more lucrative as Facebook recently released a new version to target potential buyers in terms of LTV (LifeTime Value).

By providing Facebook with information about the ideal client in terms of spending over time, instead of the usual identifier such as name, email, and phone number, it is possible to reach a more qualitative audience.

Again, for all the reasons already listed above, it's important that Lookalike Audiences are regularly and automatically updated to be relevant and effective.

Conclusion

Facebook Custom Audiences is a perfect tool for all businesses.

With it, you can boost your leads and sales as you are targeting people that are likely to convert. Through retargeting, it can drive traffic to both your online and offline stores. If you have an app for your business, it will help to increase installs.

To maximize the results you get from using the Custom Audiences tool, create different audiences using different time frames to see your audience size. You can test 30, 45, and 90 days.

If you are not tech-savvy, you can set up a Facebook Custom Audiences using our Custom Audiences Sync tool. It takes off the stress in uploading and updating data and creating the Custom Audience.

In conclusion, companies with rich databases and profiled customers can take real advantage of retargeting campaigns, increasing profit margin, and providing a better shopping experience to their customers.

However, the scale of operations required to manage the advertising campaigns is too large to be carried manually by individuals, among several departments. Therefore, marketing automation becomes an essential component of the company's retargeting success.

With our tool, you can easily integrate Facebook's Custom Audience with the rest of your marketing stack so that you can stay on top of lead data as it's coming in. With just a few clicks, you can connect Facebook's Custom Audience to your CRM, and never have to worry about it again. Give it a try today, and request a demo or start for free so that we can show you how we can help.