How to set up custom audiences on Facebook Business Manager
Now that you have connected your Facebook account to the conversion API, we are going to create custom audiences to leverage this data. This will allow you to target your ads to customers who have already been to your venue and/ or purchased from you or to potential new customers!
What is a custom audience? A custom audience is a defined group of people who already have a relationship with your business. This will help you create more effective ads as the group you’re targeted are already aware of or know your business.
For example, let's suppose that you want to create a happy hour promotion and advertise it on social media. How can you target people that know your venue and have already been there? With a custom audience based on previous customers!
Even if you don’t plan to do any ads right now - this will continue to build an audience over time. You cannot retrospectively get this data, so it's essential to set up now so you can jump right into it when you're ready to start your advertising plan.
There are two types of custom audiences we want to create:
- People who have purchased from you through your me&u URL
- People who have looked at your me&u menu but not necessarily purchased (i.e., a customer might have looked at the menu, but another person at the table made the purchase)
To create a custom audience follow these steps:
- In Business Manager, scroll down to audience (you can access it by clicking this link)
- In the top left corner, click create audiences and select custom audience
- Choose Website as your source
Let's now create the first audience made of all the users that visited your venue.
After clicking Next you should have a window that looks like this:
In the Events section select "People who visited specific web pages".
Then type your me&u URL as per the image below
Give it a name, a description and click Create Audience.
Great job!
Creating a customer-only audience
Let's now create a second audience that will see only users who made a purchase in your venue.
Again, click Create Audience in the top left corner, then Custom Audience. Select your website as the source of the audience then change the Event from "All website visitors" to "People who visited specific web pages".
In this case, the URL will be your confirmation page which is:
https://www.me&u.com/yourvenue/checkout
Save your audience and voilà!
This audience will be automatically updated based on the events that we selected before.
Creating a Lookalike audience
Let's create one more audience. Facebook is a very powerful platform when is about audience creation, they are able to create an audience based on your customers. This is called Lookalike. Facebook is able to find people that are similar to your ideal customer. This audience is perfect if you want to find new potential customers and it's so simple to create!
Go back to Audiences by clicking here. Now, tick one of the two audiences that we created before and click the icon with the 3 buttons in the centre and click Create Lookalike.
The source will be the audience we have created, select the audience location (Australia, New Zealand, United States etc.) then select the audience size that you prefer.
Try not to go over 3% Lookalike as the more you increase, the less accurate it will be.
Click Create Audience, all done 😁
Now let's use these audiences to create some Facebook Campaigns!