Facebook Audience-Complete Guide -Everything you wanted to know!

Facebook offers different types of Audiences for you to target in you advertising campaigns. Please see the details below:

1. Core audiences- Facebook owned audience/data and actual people- Select your audience manually based on characteristics such as age and location.

2. Custom Audience- Your 1st party data or Upload your contact list to connect with your customers on Facebook.

3. Lookalike audiences- Use your customer information to find people similar to them on Facebook.

4. Saved audience- You can create the audience and save them for all the future use.

Lets look at the ways and places you can find and create audiences. So basically, there are 2 places where you can create audiences

First option  You can do it while you create the campaign, it is available at the campaign level.

Second option

Go to the below and click on the drop-down and select Audiences

You can create audience by clicking 'Create Audience' button as shown below

Please note that once you have created the audience (you will see below how to do it in a second) - you can see the type of audience (custom or lookalike etc), its size (number of people in it- as FB measures real people and not cookies unlike Google do), Availability (whether the audience is ready to be used in the campaign or not or is it still under progress of updating etc) , Date created and whether or not , it has been shared with any other account.


Lets now click on the Create Audience button

CUSTOM AUDIENCES



Lets start creating Custom Audience first

you can see in the red box, these are the options available for you to create custom audiences

Lets dig deep into the details

Lets first click on Customer file

You have  3 options:

• Upload your list in .csv or txt format
• Import from Mailchimp ESP directly
• The 3rd one - LTV customers- this is the latest update and is very useful in case if you you are looking for lookalike audience similar to your high LTV audience

Lets click on first option. Its a 4 step process, just upload the file in the above format, select your audience name and click next. In the next step, you will be asked to map the data- for example -if your file contains name , email and telephone number and you want to use name and telephone number, click on that. After that just click next and then your audience is ready to use.

Please note that after you perform the above step, it takes some time for the audience to reflect, till the time it is processing your request, you will see a notification in the Audience availability column.

In the above example, you can currently use 15 identifiers as shown below

Similarly you can create the other 2 audiences. For mailchimp, you need to connect it to your Facebook account

Now lest have a look at Website Traffic audience

Click on the option - see red box above

You can include people who meet the criterias as stated, maximum timeframe for lookback window is 180 days

Further you can include more or exclude specific audiences. Name your audience after selecting the criteria and then click create audience and Voila! your website traffic audience is ready

Now lets have a look at the third type of custom audience App Activity

It is similar to create the website audience, very simple and straightforward

Now lets have a look at 4th option- Offline Activity

Select the criteria and name your audience. then click Save. You are done!!!!

Now, lets see the last Custom audience Engagement

You can create custom based on -Videos watched on FB, people interacted with your lead generation campaigns and forms,people who have interacted with the full screen or canvas , people who has interacted with your FB or Instagram account etc.

Some of the things you can do is

Videos (max 365 days)

Lead forms- maximum 90 days

Full screen experience- maximum 365 days

Facebook Page- maximum 365 days

Instagram Page- maximum 365 days

Events- maximum 365 days

LOOKALIKE AUDIENCES (short form- LAL)

Lets have a look at LAL Audiences

You need to have a source or the seed audience- this is required because FB will look at the seed audience and based on that will create the lookalikes. After that, you need to enter the location- country in this case.

The next step here would be to click on the advanced options in Audience size, it will look something like below when clicked

Audience size 1 is the for the most relevant and have higher accuracy while 10 is not that relevant but is used for the reach side of the spectrum

Note: Once you finished creating the above audience, use the tiered exclusion strategy. For example if you create 5 audience: 1%, 2%, 5%, 7% and 10% , then exclude 7% from 10% , 5% from 7% audience and so on. This will make sure that your audience is not getting overlapped.

SAVED AUDIENCE

Now lets have the look at the last type of audience which is saved audience. This is basically a kind of audience that you want to create before you start the campaigns- this can be a time saver and can be used in multiple campaigns without having to create audience from scratch

Click the Create Audience drop down and select Saved Audience

Just fill all the fields as marked in orange as shown below, once done hit save and your saved audience is ready.

If you have any other questions specific to Audiences, please comment below so that I can help and assist you.

Thanks a lot for reading.

Sarang