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Learning to create

Facebook Audiences for AD campaigns

In setting up Facebook ads, an essential part of the process is the building of your Facebook Audiences. These are simple groups of Facebook users that you can create through a number of means. If you are in any doubt as to whether you should bother with Audiences you can stop thinking that now and understand that they are important for you in being successful with ads and they provide rigour to your ad-building process as a whole.

For campaigns there are probably three sources for you in starting to build these audiences.

+ Your database of voters/citizens

+ Visitors to your website

+ Engagers of your FB properties, eg Page, Ads, etc

How to startThe Campaign Blueprint

Once you have built an audience from one of these sources you can then create a Lookalike audience that builds a much larger audience for you automatically. This Lookalike audience is similar to the core audience but widens the net of your advertising significantly.

Let’s go through an Audience set up and see what the steps are for you in setting up each of these types.

On www.business.facebook.com go to the top left drop down bar and choose Audience. This brings you to your Audiences page. Here you can hit the blue Create Audience button. Choose Custom Audience from the dropdown.

Step 1

The Campaign Blueprint

FB will now present you with the options for creating an audience. We will go through 3 of these.

Firstly, let’s look at Customer File. This allows you to import a file of contacts or cut and paste information about contact into FB. You can also import contacts from your Mailchimp account, if you have one. FB will then read these and try to match that data with its database to find FB users. This might take about 30 minutes to process.

The information you will want to have in your files will be things like email address, name, phone number, city, and so on. There are handy guides to importing that pop up as you are going through the process, but rest assured it is a very simple importer and doesn’t require you to do anything other than hit the import button.

You will be asked, at this time, to give a name to the audience you are creating so try to be as clear as possible about who they are as you might be using this audience for quite a while.

Step 2 - Customer File source

The Campaign Blueprint

At this stage, if you have a FB pixel (ie tracking code) installed on the pages of your website you can now choose this method to create an audience. This is, perhaps, one of the best ways to create an audience because it is constantly changing and it is made up of people who have shown an interest in you by visiting your site. It will allow you to retarget people with your message and ensure that they do not forget about you. If you need help in getting the FB pixel installed, go to the person that created your website.

Step 2 - Website visitors source

This is a great way of capturing people who have engaged with your FB presence, whether that is your FB page (a new and welcome feature), your ads or your canvass. It is similar to the website retargeting method and should yield better results for you as this is a ‘warm audience’. It is self-explanatory how to set it up and just requires a couple of clicks to get it going.

Step 2 - Engagement on FB source

The Campaign Blueprint

Once you have named the audience and imported you will see it appear in your list of audiences and it will usually say, Populating, so you know it isn’t ready for use yet. When it is ready for use you can then create an ad campaign that delivers to that audience. If you want your ads to go to people that share similar characteristics to those in your audience then you can simply click the audience tickbox (as in the diagram) and choose Create Lookalike from the dropdown menu. This will allow you to expand your audience reach. When creating a lookalike audience remember it is territory specific, eg, US, and you will also have the option to make the lookalike very broad or quite specific based on whether you choose Level 1 to Level 10.

Step 3

The Campaign Blueprint

Have a plan of action with audiences. Try to map out what demographics you want to have custom audiences for in advance. Do not create audiences on a whim and forget who they are. Try to have, at least one retargeting audience. Consider creating audiences based on the voter targeting you have already identified, that way you will have a way to reach out to those targets in advance of field operations.

If you require any further information on audience building for FB ads please contact us.

Step 4