September 7, 2017
Almost a year ago I wrote about the ability to build remarketing audiences in Facebook without a user having to actually leave Facebook and visit a site. It’s a unique way to try and “meet” people where they are and learn something about them. It’s also a pretty powerful technique for filtering out your best potential customers and then later remarketing to them a more specific message to get a conversion and continue the conversation.
If you want to reference the original article you find it below:
Create Remarketing Audiences Without Users Ever Leaving Facebook
In the time since that original article, Facebook has made a lot of changes to their platform, including updating the audiences that can be created from more interactive, engagement style ads (video, canvas, lead form, events, etc.). These all allow you to remarket to people who simply engaged with an ad and didn’t necessarily end up on your site, app, etc.
Below you can see a screenshot from the original article when we only had three options available for creating audiences from these ad types.
As you can see in the updated screenshot, there are many more options for creating remarketing audiences from these types of ads than there were originally.
Now you can target everything from people that have watched a video, interacted with a Facebook page, checked out an event, and everything in between. These updates largely follow two patterns: small updates to the names and organization of the original audiences and the creation of new types of audiences based on newer ads and experiences.
We’ll highlight the changes to the original audiences as well describe what each of the new audiences allows us to do and where they might be useful.
Previous Audience Updates
The original three audiences (video, lead ad, and canvas) have gone through relatively limited adjustments that mostly involve naming changes and integrations with platforms and new ad types. We’ll focus on the updates to these audiences below, but for a more in-depth discussion of these audiences and how they can be used you can reference the previous article listed above.
- Video has remained relatively constant with the ability to target people who have watched a certain amount of video by time or percentage, but now is integrated with Instagram as well as Facebook.
- The Lead Ad audience has been renamed “Lead Form” and is also now fully integrated with Instagram. The core ways to target people remain similar, you can target people who have opened the form, opened the form and didn’t submit, or opened the form and did submit.
- The last audience of the original three, Canvas has been renamed “Full Screen Experience” and still includes the ability to target people who have opened a Canvas ad or clicked on links within a Canvas ad. The main difference is that this type of targeting is also integrated with Facebook’s newer Collection ads that open up a similar experience to a Canvas ad when clicked.
New Audience Options
Along with the previous targeting mentioned above, Facebook has launched three more ways we can target people who have interacted with things within its platform. We’ll discuss Facebook Pages, Instagram Business Profile, and Events in the following sections.
Facebook Page
Much as the title suggests, the Facebook Page audiences allow you to target people based on their interactions with your page, including everything from visiting your page, saving a page or post, and sending a message to your page.
Since most businesses start out with a Facebook Page long before they move to paid advertising, this type of targeting is likely to be beneficial because of that built up audience and interactions with your fans. This targeting provides paid ways to reach out to those people with your marketing efforts.
Since people can find your page in a multitude of ways outside of paid advertising, it’s also a great way to continue to reach out to them with offers, updates, and messages while they move through their feed.
Instagram Business Profile
The Instagram Business Profile is similar to the Facebook Page targeting above, except it specifically references your Instagram profile versus your Facebook page.
This type of targeting could be useful if you get a lot more traffic and interaction on your Instagram profile or you wanted to treat your Instagram visitors to a different ad experience from your Facebook visitors. Otherwise the use cases for this are similar to the Facebook Page audiences discussed above.
Facebook Events
The last updated audience is the Events audience. This allows you to target people who have in some way, shape, or form interacted with your events within Facebook. As you can see in the screenshot below, you can structure your audience toward those that are going and interested or either one individually.
These types of remarketing audiences could be really useful in telling people who are going to an event what other activities are going on that they might be interested in. They could be used to provide more detail to someone that is interested, but hasn’t yet committed. There are a ton of ways in which the audiences could be used to reinforce the event messaging and increase sign-ups and upsells.
Conclusion
These audiences and the engagement style ads that feed them are really potent tools to use in your Facebook advertising. The ads can not only get you conversions, but they also provide you data on interactions and get you closer to the intent of the user. Even if you don’t get a direct conversion, you can use that interaction as discussed above to remarket and potentially close the conversion and a later time.