How to Set Up A Custom Audience (Retarget Website Visitors)

Setting Up Custom Audiences on Facebook Ads Manager

Custom Audiences are groups of target markets that you create within the Facebook Ads platform, that you can direct specific marketing messages to. In some instances, you may want ads to reach certain people with very specific traits/activities/intent, but NOT other people. This is what Custom Audiences allows you to do.

Example: Let’s say you’re running a promotional offer on your website for an E-Book in exchange for an email. You use a specific landing page for this and send people to a Thank You Page when they share their lead information.  Not everyone who visits the landing page will convert to a lead - maybe someone rang, or the kettle went off, or the dog wanted food - people get distracted. Now, do you want that to be the end of the journey for those people? Of course you don’t. You want them to become your lead; or, at least, you want to give them every chance for that to happen. So we run an ad with a Custom Audience directly targeting those drop-offs ONLY and we give them a reminder or an added incentive, getting them back on our landing page and following through with sharing their lead information.

So how do we catch those people who’ve fallen off our landing page without giving their lead information? Well, we need a Customer Audience to do this, as Facebook doesn't automatically give this option. After all, how could they know the targeting specifics without you telling them?

Note: You Will Need To Set Up Your FACEBOOK PIXEL On Your Website FIRST Before This Step.

Before you create a Custom Audience, you want to clearly define the audience you want to create.

Audience Example: People who HAVE visited www.socialenviro.com/e-book-offer but who HAVE NOT visited www.socialenviro.com/e-book-thank-you.

See how we have narrows that audience right down, while including drop-offs and excluding people who have shared their lead information? Remember, people can ONLY reach the Thank You Page if they’ve already shared their information - so we don’t want to include those people.

Let’s Take it Step by Step!

1. Go to business.facebook.com

2. Click the top-left menu. Under the ‘Assets’ column, click ‘Audiences’.

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3. Click ‘Create a Custom Audience’. You’ll see 10 different options, but we want to select ‘Website’.

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4. Change the drop-down from ‘All website visitors’ to ‘People who visited specific web pages’ and adjust the days to a suitable time frame. 30 days is fine here.

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5. Change the drop-down from ‘Contains’ to ‘Equals’, and paste in your E-Book Landing Page URL.  

6. After pasting in your landing page link, click 'Exclude People'.

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7. Repeat steps 4 & 5 and then paste in your link for your Thank You page.

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8. Name your audience to something that is easy to identify later on. In this case, we can name it ‘E-Book Landing Page - No Thank You’ Page' OR 'E-Book LP Drop Offs'.

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9. Click ‘Create Audience’.

Now, when we create new ads, under the audience section, we can select this audience and remarket to people who have dropped off our landing page! 

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Remember, just because someone has shown interest by visiting your Landing Page (and dropped off), they may need some extra incentive to share their lead information with you. It is worth split testing different additional incentives to see what gets your audience to bite. Keep testing!

Still stuck? Reach out to us!