Before we understand the term, let’s get down to brass tacks.
Facebook is among the biggest social media platforms, with billions of users.
Naturally, Facebook wanted to make money off this traffic, so they introduced Facebook Ads, an advertising platform for brands wishing to connect with their audience. Once Facebook Ads was up, it showed ads to the people who came to its platform.
To ensure that the right people saw the right ads, they added a feature to their ad platform called Custom Audience.
What does a custom audience help with?
Custom Audience is a targeting tool that only connects people who have interacted with your brand. This is a relatively focused way of marketing your offerings only to those most likely to buy them instead of spraying your ads or carpet bombing.
Why is a custom audience important?
- Relevance : Building a custom audience means sending hyper-personalized communications to your users, who are more likely to react and respond.
- Retarget : Not all users buy or subscribe to something the first time they visit your platform. Through custom audiences, Facebook helps you retarget the same users who are now simply scrolling through Facebook while they are more relaxed and not bogged down by an obligation to buy.
- Upsell & cross-sell : Besides retargeting, custom audience also lets you resell to those who bought from you in the past by recommending similar products or services from your catalog. For example, have you ever seen an ad for mobile covers right after buying a smartphone? That’s upselling for you.
- Save time and money : By advertising to a limited but focused group, you save lots of time and money, which would have been wasted on advertising to larger but irrelevant groups.
How does a custom audience work?
Custom Audience is designed to work differently to fit a brand’s needs.
Types of custom audiences
- Website Custom Audiences: This option matches people who visit your website with profiles on Facebook
- App activity Custom Audience : This option lets you target only those people who are most likely to take the action you want them to take on your app.
- Customer list Custom Audience : This option lets you upload offline lists in the form of CSV or TXT files, and Facebook finds you matching users on their platform.
- Engagement Custom Audiences : This option matches you with people who have interacted with Facebook or other apps from the Facebook universe, like Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger.
Other types of audience
- Saved Audience : An audience who shares common traits, interests, geographies, and other metrics falls under this category.
- Lookalike Audience : An audience similar to an existing custom audience or from a current database. It contains users that match other users who already care about your brand or have interacted with it.
All in all, using such features allows marketers to find the right users to engage and grow their business instead of broadcasting their ads by burning a hole in their pockets.
Conclusion
Simply put, Facebook’s Custom Audience is a targeting tool used to build a set of users and advertise a brand’s offerings only to those users because they are most likely to respond. This is a rather focused way of marketing your offerings only to those who are most likely to buy them as opposed to spraying your ads or carpet bombing.
