Today’s post is an important news update from Facebook, and in case you haven’t it seen already, I just wanted to quickly share with you the powerful new marketing features Facebook is rolling out (announced in early May, 2016).
So what’s the deal?
Well, the most important and exciting part of the announcement was the launch of new retargeting tools within Custom Audiences in Facebook Ads Manager.
Facebook is introducing an additional 5 options for creating custom audiences based on varying metrics:
- Frequency: how many times someone does a certain thing, such as visit your store page.
- Time spent: how much time someone spent doing a certain thing, such as exploring a website or viewing a specific page.
- Dynamic date: a range of dates that the person has shown interest in, such as for a flight or a hotel reservation.
- Aggregated values: the total amount that a person has spent.
- Devices: these include Android devices, iOS devices, desktop and other mobile devices.
Now, if you’re anything like me, this makes you pretty excited because retargeting is one of the highest ROI ad types and these new features have plenty of different useful applications for maximizing your ad spend.
Currently, the only ones available are the frequency and devices options. Also note that my Facebook Ads account tends to get these updates first, so this may not apply to you yet, but now you know what to expect!
Imagine what you can do with custom audiences…
Now, you can start layering in these additional options of frequency and devices, making your targeting even more laser focused.
One of the first useful applications that comes to mind is your VIP list. If someone visited your site 10 times in the last 180 days they are very valuable to you, and Facebook now gives the option to target these people specifically.
How do you access these new tools (assuming your account has this option already)?
- Go to your Ads Manager
- Click on Audiences
- Then Create Audience
- Now hit Customer Audience
- Then Website Traffic
- Now hit Custom Combinations
- …and here some of you should be able to see “Advanced mode”, turn on the switch!
Start with the frequency metric
As an example, you could target people who have visited your site at least 1 time in the last 30 days (180 days is the current limit) using the “at least” function pictured below:
You can also chose to target traffic coming from mobile, desktop or both.
Note: Once you hit “Create Audience” It’s going to take a bit of time to populate and start working, but be patient, it will be worth it!
When are the other new features going to be available?
Well, that’s up to Big Blue (otherwise known as Facebook) but you can be sure they will eventually release the other retargeting options and they too will open up new avenues for growth.
In the meantime I encourage you to experiment and get used to the new retargeting options which ARE available to you. Don’t forget the name of the game is testing so take advantage of these new features, they are super powerful.
That’s all for today folks, stay tuned for future updates on this topic, I will be posting about the additional retargeting options when they come out!