Custom Audiences for Black Friday Facebook Ads
Custom Audiences for Black Friday Facebook Ads
As it’s mid-November it’s appropriate for my latest blog to talk about custom audiences for Black Friday Facebook ads.
To help you achieve better ad success let’s take a look at which custom audiences you should be creating in your Facebook Ad Manager account. These are the people you want to target with your exciting Black Friday sales and offers.
The great news is that these group of people have already demonstrated that they are interested and like what you do – they are your warm audience. They are more likely to buy from you and be receptive to hear what you have on offer. The audiences you retarget may be a smaller group than others, but hopefully you will get more sales from them meaning that you will maximize your return on investment.
Which custom audiences should you be creating?
What I need you to do is:
Go into your Ads Manager
Head to your menu
Find ‘audiences’ and select this
It’s here in ‘audiences’ where you create your custom audience.
Consider creating these custom audiences:
website visitors.
breakdown website visitors by specific pages (great practice if you are a product-based company!
those who have visited your ‘thank you’ pages or specific ‘landing pages’.
if you've promoted products previously why not include anyone who has visited these pages over the past 180 days for example.
Anyone who has purchased something (if you have a Purchase event tracking on your website).
People who have added items to their cart (again this is easier if you have a shop functionality on your website as it will automatically track these people)
Give a great customer experience
As you can see there are lots of options available to you to define the right audiences for the type of offer you have.
Really think about customer service too. Do you want to be targeting your customers repeatedly? I could be that they don’t want to be bombarded with ads if they have already bought, so you want to think here about excluding some people (purchasers) or creating smaller audiences (website visitors in the last 30 days).
Engagement audiences
This type of custom audience includes people who like your Facebook page or your Instagram profile.
They will already be engaging with the content you're putting out there. It’s highly likely that they’ll be interested in what you've got to offer.
It can also include those who are watching your videos. It’s possible to track video view audiences too enabling you to create custom audiences depending on how much time they have watched your videos.
Don’t forget your customer lists
When creating custom audiences for ads it’s important to think about the people who have signed up to your email lists and your bot subscribers. Check that you are GDPR compliant and get them uploaded! Facebook walks you through exactly how to do it, so it’s quite easy.
Shop engagement
You’ll get good results when targeting custom audiences who have interacted with your shop on Facebook or Instagram. They’re clearly interested in your products and will be pleased to hear if they can get a great deal from you on Black Friday.
Custom audiences are great value for you!
As I mentioned earlier, your custom audiences may not be huge, but as they are aware of what you do and have shown an interest, they are more likely to take you up on your Black Friday offer. I think some people can’t actually wait to hear from you around this time of year!
So, as it’s not a huge group, you won’t have to use as much ad spend to get the ads out to them and you’ll make more of a return on investment if they buy. Good news all round!
Lookalike audiences
Another benefit of custom audiences is that you can create lookalike audiences from them.
These are really powerful cold audiences based on the warm audiences mentioned before - for example, those who have purchased from your website.
I recommend that you start with these lookalike audiences rather than reaching out to interest-based cold audiences as they often work well.
My favourites to create using your warm custom audiences as the seed audience are your email list, purchasers, people who have submitted a form to your website (if you’re tracking these for instance as a Complete Registration event). They are more hot than warm!
Exclusions
I touched on this earlier on in the blog. You may not want to target all the people in your audience.
For purchase conversion objectives for example, you might want to exclude people who have bought from you in the last 14 days perhaps. By creating that custom audience initially, you can then use it to take out the people who have taken action and leave behind the ones who haven’t still.
You are effectively maximising the amount of people who you are getting in front of with your offer so that you’re not repeating yourself to the same group of people. There’s a huge audience out there who haven’t yet properly engaged with you.
And you never know, some of these could go on to be your best customers. Try it!
You know your customers better than anyone, so you will know how often someone is likely to leave it before buying from you again – have a look at past statistics to see if there is a buyer pattern.
And if there’s a group of people not following this usual trend a Black Friday ad campaign is a wonderful way to give them a ‘gentle’ nudge to become a customer once again.
What’s retargeting?
If you are not familiar with the term ‘retargeting’, this is when you target people who have already shown an interest in your brand, products and services. These are the people who have engaged with you on social media or checked out your website for example.
Once they have taken a certain action, you create an ad specifically to them – remember those ads from your favourite clothes shops that magically appear in your Facebook feed when you’ve been browsing? Those are retargeting ads. You will be in an audience of people who have viewed their content and into the next section of their ad campaign, reminding you to buy!
Any questions?
If you need help with anything to do with Facebook Ads, including how to set up your custom audiences, you may benefit from having a power hour with me. A full 60 minutes where we concentrate on ironing out any issues that you are experiencing or learning how to set up your ads for success. For just £97, I’ll get you on track! Here’s a link to book yourself onto a power hour where you decide on what you want to cover.