Join Seer as we take a deep dive into Facebook audience strategy with our audience first mentality.
The paid social marketing funnel illustrates the consumer’s journey to a brand through social marketing. Consumers enter the funnel through prospecting and move further down the funnel the more we retarget them. The funnel shows how consumers come to know a brand and how paid social can make prospecting customers into clientele.
There are two overarching ways to target on Facebook: Prospecting and retargeting.
Within those lie our more specific targeting methods:
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Interest audience
- Based off audience personas, have had no interaction with the brand
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Lookalike audience
- Facebook finds people who are similar to a seed audience (website custom audiences or customer remarketing lists)
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Retargeting
- People who are familiar with the brand by interacting with the website (WCA – website custom audiences) or are part of the customer retargeting list (CRM list).
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Dynamic retargeting
- Show customers products/services they have already seen through dynamic product ads based off-site pixel.
Prospecting Audiences
Prospecting audiences are interest or lookalike audiences and are comprised of people who have never interacted with your brand before. They are leveraged to coax people into the top of the funnel so that they can then be retargeted.
Interest audiences are based on consumer insights from audience insights, Facebook analytics and Google analytics.
We recommend prospecting targeting when your client wants to drive traffic to site with low CPCs. Think of it as a great first step to getting possible consumers into the funnel!
Get to know your audience
Audience Insights
Due to recent events, Facebook has limited our ability to gather information through audience insights. Currently, the only way to use audience insights is by connecting to your client’s page.
How to get here: Drop down menu → Plan → Audience insights
Once you’re connected with the page, you are able to gain demographic and activity insights with users who have connected with your page.
💡 Pro Tip: Try breaking down your audience by gender, age or location to see how interests may change. This could help you tailor your prospecting audiences and make them more specific.
Facebook Analytics
With Facebook analytics, you’re able to find information on location, gender and language that is presented in a very visually pleasing way that’s also great to share with clients!
💡 Pro Tip: If possible, encourage your client to create an event source group through FB analytics. This will allow you to measure how page engagement plays a part in conversions (info on how to create this is found in Facebook analytics settings).
Google Analytics
Google analytics has the interests tab that includes affinity categories, in-market segment, and other categories. Compare audiences in GA versus what you see in audience insights to discover more targeting options!
Affinity categories are what people higher in the brand’s funnel would be interested in. Keep in mind that this information is more general than what Facebook provides.
The in-market segments show what consumers are more likely to purchase. This might be helpful when determining which part of your client’s business you should promote.
Creating Interest Audiences
Now that you know what your brand persona is, it’s time for you to make these audiences! Seer recommends creating these audiences through assets-audiences for easy organization.
Here you will have access to all your audiences and can make saved audiences (below). Within saved audiences, you will be able to create audiences based off interests.
Pro Tips For Interest Audiences
You can make your audiences more specific and relevant to your brand by layering and narrowing your audience. It’s important to take in consideration your goals and budget when creating audience targeting. Too narrow and your CPCs will likely be very high and you may limit your potential conversion volume, too broad and you may pay for undesirable site traffic. For example:
Audience Name: Male Outdoor Enthusiast In City
Creating Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike audiences are built upon seed audiences (people who have already interacted with the brand) and are then used to find people in the general population who are similar to the seed audiences. These seed audiences are created from pixel audiences (i.e. past purchasers, site visitors, etc) or email lists.
To create a lookalike audience: Audience tab > Create audience > Lookalike audience
Once you select the seed audience, you will select which percentage of the population you want to target. The population amount will increase as the percentage targeted increases.
We recommend prospecting targeting when your client wants to drive traffic to site with low CPCs. Think of it as a great first step to getting possible consumers into the funnel!
How to Speak to Prospecting Audiences
To distinguish between audiences, it’s important to cater your message to each audience. For interest-based audiences, we’ve found that the following perform best:
- Shorter and direct copy.
- Convey value where possible and align to brand voice.
- Promos and sales are great tools to entice first-time customers with eComm clients .
- Align messaging to specific ad set targeting so you can speak to the specific pain points/interests of your audience.
💡 Pro Tips:
- Use your best performing first party audience as your seed audience
- Layer on additional targeting or group together lookalike audiences to broaden the scope
- The larger the seed audience, the more data points Facebook has to build the lookalike audience
There are several options available when it comes to the type of campaign to run on Facebook. Below are a few options.
Brand Awareness
- More reach and impressions
- Bigger audience reach
- Options to optimize towards:
- Ad recall lift (maximize total number of people who will remember seeing your ads)
- When to use: When the focus of the campaign is branding
Reach
- More reach and impressions
- Bigger audience reach
- Options to optimize towards:
- Reach (ad gets served to the maximum number of people)
- Impressions (deliver ads to people as many times as possible)
- When to use: When the focus of the campaign is to get your ad in front of as many people as possible
Traffic
- Choose where you want to drive traffic
- Less expensive CPCs than conversion campaigns
- Options to optimize towards:
- Link clicks (deliver the ad to people who are most likely to click)
- Landing page views (recommended): Deliver ad to people who are most likely to click on them and wait for website to load
- Impressions (deliver ad to as many people as many times)
- Daily unique reach (deliver ad to people up to once a day)
When to use: When the focus is for the audience to click on the ad, load the landing page, or be exposed to the brand
Conversions
- Choose conversions event based off pixel data (i.e. view content, add to cart, purchase, etc)
- The pixel represents the stages in the funnel and the farther down you go, the more expensive the audience becomes due to likelihood to purchase)
- Options to optimize towards:
- Conversions (recommended): deliver ad to the right people
- Link clicks (deliver ad to people most likely to click)
- Landing page views (deliver ad to people who are most likely to click on them and wait for website to load)
- Daily unique reach (deliver ad to people up to once a day)
- When to use: You have a conversion event in mind that you want Facebook to optimize towards (purchase, view content, etc)
It’s important to align your campaign type for prospecting audiences based on goals. Below are some examples of goals and KPIs to keep in mind when targeting interest or lookalike audiences.
- Goal: Get your brand/product in front of everyone you possibly can
- Run a brand awareness or reach campaign
- Goal: Target a slightly smaller group that is more likely to click on an ad
- Goal: Target a very narrow group that is most likely to convert on the website
- Run a conversions campaign
Retargeting Audiences
Retargeting on Facebook consists of re-engaging people who are already familiar with a brand by interacting with the website. Through Facebook’s pixel, you are able to engage with people who have been to your site, your brand page, or interacted with your ads.
To create a first-party retargeting audience, go to the audience tab within Facebook and select custom audience:
Here, you’re able to upload email lists, retarget website traffic and activity, retarget app activity, and retarget offline activity and engagement.
Re-Engage Consumers
You have the ability to re-engage your desired audiences a couple of different ways. The first is through email.
Upload your email list manually or create automatic imports from your email marketing service if supported by Facebook. Some example email lists are:
- Highly scored sales leads from Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, etc.
- Webinar or event attendees
- Newsletter subscribers
- Email subscribers who have not responded recently to an email marketing campaign
The second way to re-engage your audience is through engagement. The engagement tab of Facebook’s custom audiences section allows us to retarget people who have interacted with our Facebook/Instagram brand pages, video ads, leads, and events.
If you’re looking to engage current customers, try targeting those who follow or like your brand on Facebook. Furthermore, if your client is focused on lead gen campaigns, the lead form targeting is a great way to capture all your leads in a retargeting campaign.
How to Speak to Retargeting Audiences
- Be memorable, friendly, and have personality!
- This audience is already familiar with your brand, so keep this in mind when creating messaging and ad creative
- Leverage different forms of content, CTAs, and messaging to test how you can further guide your audience down the funnel
Dynamic Retargeting
With dynamic retargeting, you’re able to show customers products and services they have already seen through dynamic product ads based off the site pixel. This targeting method is at the very bottom of the funnel because you’re showing people products they have already viewed. Note that this type of campaign is only available for e-commerce clients because you’ll need a product catalog.
With dynamic retargeting, it’s best practice to target product viewers and cart abandoners. In addition, Facebook recommends that each DPA ad set receive at least 50 conversions per week so that the engine can best optimize. This will play a big part in the date ranges that are being retargeted.
Pro tip: If a client has several repeat purchasers, include a past purchaser segment targeting past purchasers from 30-90 days ago!
Who Should I Be Targeting?
If a client has an extremely low conversion rate (>10 conversions/week) break out ad sets like this:
| Product Viewers | 1-30 Days |
| Cart Abandoners | 1-30 Days |
If a client has a low conversion rate (10-50 conversions/week), break out ad sets like this:
| Product Viewers | 1-10 Days; 11-30 Days |
| Cart Abandoners | 1-10 Days; 11-30 Days |
If a client has a higher conversion rate (50+ conversions/week), break out ad sets like this:
| Product Viewers | 1-3 Days; 4-10 Days, 11-30 Days |
| Cart Abandoners | 1-3 Days; 4-10 Days, 11-30 Days |
How to Build DPA Ad Sets
As mentioned above, dynamic product ads allow us to retarget people based on products they have viewed, products they have added to cart, products they have purchased, and much more! To create these ad sets in a DPA campaign, you will need to use logical statements. Here are some examples of how the ad sets should be set up. You’ll just need to change the time frame per ad set!
Product Viewers: 1-10 days
Cart Abandoners: 1-10 days
Product Viewers: 11-30 days
Cart Abandoners: 11-30 days
Upselling
An additional function of dynamic ads is showing products to people who have purchased certain products. This function is called cross-selling and is at the ad set level where you figure out your audiences. In order to create this, you will need to have two product sets:
- One will need to be products that people have bought
- The second needs to be products that you want people to see since they bought the first product
Wondering when to use upselling? When you have products that are usually bought together and are related! For example, when a customer buys a toothbrush, show them replacement toothbrush heads.
Be sure to tailor your ad copy for this feature!
How to Speak to Consumers in Dynamic Product Ads
No need to make these super branded! Check with your client on this.nIf they’re okay with more direct messaging, great! If not, work with them on something they’re happy with.
The consumers know that you’re showing them what they’ve already looked at, so why not call that out and have some fun with it? Some examples of this are:
- “See something you like? Shop all the latest and greatest at … ”
- Plays on words