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I was digging around Facebook Analytics the other day and noticed that some new and extremely powerful features for Facebook advertisers look like they’re just around the corner.
I couldn’t find anyone on the Internet talking about this new set of features, so I want to put a prediction I made at the office the other day on public record.
My prediction:
In Q4 2018, Facebook will unleash loads of new ways to create custom audiences for retargeting / lookalikes through importing Facebook Analytics segments into Facebook Ads as custom audiences. Click To Tweet
What do I mean? And how do I know this?
Facebook Analytics
Facebook recently launched a tool called Facebook Analytics, a free tool that is designed to work with Facebook Ads. It is similar to Google Analytics and lets you analyze your website traffic with respect to Facebook’s data in order to identify valuable insights. The tool hasn’t been promoted much and is still in its early stages. It is not as robust as Google Analytics, but there are already some features that give Facebook Analytics unique value.
These features include being able to analyze your website traffic by:
- Pages liked on Facebook
- Online purchasing behavior
- Lifestyle categories
- Relationship status
- Household income
- Home ownership status, and more
The above features are all really cool, but the feature I’m most excited about is the ability to “Create a Segment” from your website traffic and import that segment into Facebook Ads as a custom audience to which you can begin advertising. It’s Facebook’s much delayed response to Google for enabling importing segments from Google Analytics into AdWords as retargeting audiences.
Currently, with the standard way of building custom audiences in Facebook Ads you can only leverage the following conditions to create custom audiences:
- All website visitors
- People who visited a specific page
- Visitors by time spent on site
- Custom events
- Number of sessions
- Device
- Customer lists
If you’re not familiar with building custom audiences, you can read this AdEspresso guide.
Learn More: How You Can Use the New Facebook Analytics [podcast]
What Facebook Analytics Can Unlock
With Facebook Analytics, you can create segments that cover a lot more conditions than you can with the standard method of creating custom audiences in Facebook Ads. Here are some of the new parameters you can play around with in Facebook Analytics:
- Search engine referrer, social network referrer, referring domain / URL
- Device type, operating system, space available on HD, web browser
- App install source
- Custom percentile range for a condition (e.g. users in the 25% – 75% range of time spent on site)
After creating a segment you can then turn that segment into a custom audience to advertise to through Facebook Ads. That means you can create all sorts of retargeting audiences and lookalikes from those audiences as well!
But there’s one big catch at the moment…
If the segment you create involves a new parameter that can’t already be accessed in Facebook Ads for creating custom audiences, then Facebook will show you this message:
“This segment is not eligible for custom audience creation because it includes 1 or more rules not supported at this time:”
Learn More: How to Easily Set Up a High-Conversion Facebook Retargeting Campaign
Reading Between The Lines
At the moment, you can only use this Facebook Analytics feature to create custom audiences that are in line with the standard parameters of creating a custom audience in Facebook Ads. That means that you can’t use this feature to create new types of audiences just yet.
But I want you to read the error message again when trying to create new types of custom audiences through Facebook Analytics. This time pay attention to the last three words:
“This segment is not eligible for custom audience creation because it includes 1 or more rules not supported at this time:”
It sounds like Facebook intends on making this level of custom audience building possible and the fact that it’s already public-facing makes me think it must be just around the corner. When this feature is fully functional, Facebook will have enabled a whole new world of building retargeting and lookalike audiences.
So once again, here is my prediction:
In Q4 2018, Facebook will unleash loads of new ways to create custom audiences for retargeting and lookalike audiences through importing Facebook Analytics segments into Facebook Ads as custom audiences.
Related Content: What Facebook’s New Algorithm Update Means for Marketers in Early 2018 [podcast]
What This Means for Facebook Advertisers
Once this feature is fully enabled, we’ll be able to build all sorts of new custom audiences for retargeting and lookalike audiences. Here are four examples of some of the new types of custom audiences you’ll likely be able to create once this feature is fully rolled out:
- Target users who hit your website from organic searches or even specific search engines like google, Bing or duckduckgo.
- Target users who went to your website by clicking on a link in a press hit (even though it doesn’t have UTM parameters associated with it).
- Target people who downloaded your app through any one or all of the following “App Install Sources”: Facebook Ad, Instagram Ad, Facebook Organic, or Audience Network.
- Target people who are browsing with Chrome on an iPhone X with at least 2GB of memory available on their mobile device.
It is not possible to create the above custom audiences with Facebook’s current custom audience features, but they should be available as Facebook Analytics is further developed. In the meantime, I’ll be keeping a close eye on Facebook Analytics to see when this new feature is fully rolled out.
Sneak peak for my next Facebook prediction…Facebook applied for a patent that describes an entirely new landscape for digital advertising and no one is talking about it.