• Custom audiences are groups of people who have already interacted with your business.
• When your ad experts target custom audiences, you can lower your company’s ad spend and increase its ROI.
• Social Ktchn can create highly effective custom audiences and handle every other aspect of your social media ad campaign.

What Is a Facebook Custom Audience? We Explain

No matter how much thought you put into your advertising strategy and ad creatives, you won’t get the results you’re looking for without taking ad targeting seriously. The rise of digital advertising has made the targeting process much simpler than it was decades ago, but you’ll still need the help of an expert ad team to maximize your investment and avoid unexpected issues along the way.

One of the best ways to ensure your ads reach the right people is by creating one or more custom audiences on Meta’s platforms—but what is a Facebook custom audience, anyway? If you don’t already know the answer to this question, you’re almost certainly missing out on some powerful ad targeting tools. If you’re not exploring custom audiences and connecting with ad experts who have a strong understanding of how to leverage them, you’re leaving money on the table!

Custom Audiences: the Basics

Facebook is more widely used than any other social media platform on the planet—as of 2023, it had nearly 3 billion active users per month. And since advertising on Facebook will give you a potential ad reach of 1.98 billion people, getting your ads in front of the right users is crucial. 

Custom audiences can help. These are predefined groups of people who have already made a connection with your company in some way. When your advertising team knows how to create and utilize custom audiences, you’ll be able to boost your ROI while keeping your ad spend to a minimum.

Custom Audience Types You Need to Know

If you’re wracking your brain wondering “What is a Facebook custom audience and what can it do for my business?” you’re not alone! There are actually “custom” custom audiences, and it can get confusing quickly without a Facebook ad expert to help explain it all and spearhead your campaign.

While planning marketing campaigns on Meta platforms, your ad experts can create a few different types of custom audiences to achieve specific goals. These audience types include:

Website Custom Audiences

Website custom audiences focus on people who have visited your business’s website. You can keep track of these visitors with the Meta Pixel—a piece of code that runs on your website’s back end to help with Facebook ad retargeting and other marketing tasks.

If your ad experts know who has visited your website in the past, they can use this information to set up a custom audience containing these visitors. Then, they can create advertisements targeting people who have viewed one of your product pages without purchasing anything or anyone who has visited your site in a specific period.

App Activity Custom Audiences

These days, a considerable percentage of your business’s potential customers won’t visit your website at all—instead, they’ll connect with your brand via its app. Taking that into account, your ad team can target ads to these people by establishing an app activity custom audience.

To create one of these audiences, your ad experts will send data from your app to Meta. From there, they can use that information to build a custom audience. That will allow them to accomplish goals like running an app ad engagement campaign targeted at people who already have your app on their phones.

Customer List Custom Audiences

In some cases, businesses can create customer list custom audiences—that is, custom audiences based on “identifiers” such as addresses, phone numbers, or emails. Your ad agency can only create these custom audiences if they own your company’s Meta Business Manager ad account or if you’ve given them admin or advertiser permissions.

Once you’re sure your ad agency will be allowed to establish a customer list custom audience, you’ll want to start building a customer list. This list should include identifiers about each customer in the new audience, and it should be submitted in the form of a .TXT or .CSV file.

It’s worth noting that Meta won’t be able to view the identifiers included in your customer list on an individual basis. Before Meta accesses customer lists for custom audience creation, this information is “hashed” (an irreversible form of cryptographic security that turns each identifier into randomized code).

Engagement Custom Audiences

Finally, engagement custom audiences include people who have engaged with your business on one or more Meta platforms. Getting your ad experts to create an engagement audience is a great way to connect with people who have previously shown interest in your brand.

As an advertiser on Meta, you can ask your ad agency to establish engagement custom audiences focusing on people who have:

• Engaged with your Facebook page
• Shown interest in your events
• Followed your Instagram account
• Interacted in one of your shopping experiences
• Opened your AR camera effects
• Engaged with one of your Instant Experiences
• Interacted with your lead forms
• Viewed a video you posted

How to Reach New Customers With Lookalike Audiences

If you’re looking for new customers, you’ll want to find people who resemble members of your current customer base. Your ad experts can help you accomplish this by creating a lookalike audience.

When your advertising agency starts building one of these audiences, it will use an existing custom audience as a source audience. From that starting point, Meta’s system will analyze the behaviors, interests, and demographics of people in this group and look for others who share these traits. Then, it will deliver your ad to potential customers who “look like” people in your custom audience.

At the time your ad agency establishes your lookalike audience, they’ll be able to decide how closely they want this audience to resemble your custom audience in terms of a percentage. The smaller this percentage is, the closer your lookalike audience will be to your custom audience; the larger it is, the more diverse your lookalike audience will be.

According to Meta, the source audiences used for lookalike audience creation should contain between 1,000 and 5,000 people. Of course, size isn’t the only factor your ad experts should take into consideration—the quality of this audience is also crucial. With that in mind, creating a custom audience that focuses on your best customers could deliver better results than one that consists of a cross-section of your entire customer base.

Follow These Best Practices for Lookalike Audiences

Once you’ve created a handful of lookalike audiences, you’ll want to know you’re getting the best possible results from this targeting strategy. To that end, make sure your ad experts keep these best practices in mind:

• Send identical ads to each lookalike audience. This will make it easier to determine the value of these audiences.
• Watch how your ads perform. At this point, your ad agency should take revenue per conversion or the lifetime value of each lookalike audience’s members into account. (Note that lookalike audiences that closely match their source audience are often—but not always—more valuable than less-similar audiences.)
• Adjust your ad spending based on results. The more valuable an audience proves to be, the more you should bid for it.

Get the Best Results from Your Custom Audiences

So, what is a Facebook custom audience marketing strategy going to do for your bottom line? Custom audiences are a vital element of any successful advertising campaign on Meta, but not every business knows what these groups are or how to establish them. Fortunately, working with a skilled ad agency like Social Ktchn can help you avoid this issue and other negative outcomes.

The ad experts at Social Ktchn don’t just understand custom audiences—we know everything there is to know about ad targeting across Meta’s apps. When you work with us, you’ll also get a customized marketing strategy, gorgeous ad creatives, and some of the most painstaking ad testing in the industry. Take the first step by getting in touch today!