Facebook launched a new feature in custom audiences which enables businesses to advertise to people who have previously visited their website or used a mobile app.
This means businesses can now use Facebook’s advertising platform rather than a 3rd party provider like AdRoll or Perfect Audience.
Whilst this feature was announced on 16th October 2013, it was not officially rolled out until four days ago.
If you are using Facebook’s interface to manage your ads, you may not have this feature available to you yet. However, you may be able to access this feature via Power Editor (Facebook’s tool for managing campaigns).
There are a number of positives about this:
1. You won’t need to pre-pay to advertise
2. Potentially the cost to remarket will be lower than using a third party platform
3. It’s more convenient – you only need to login to one interface rather than two difference platforms
4. You may find you get more impressions using Facebook’s platform rather than a 3rd party tool.
5. You can now choose between CPC and CPM bidding.
6. The ability to segment your audience and only remarket to people who have gone to a certain page of your website
7. More control over where your ad appears – you can choose desktop News Feed, mobile or sidebar
Who should use Website Custom Audiences?
If you are a small to medium sized business – or one which has a small number of products, then using Website Custom Audiences will be perfect for you.
Larger businesses or those with a large number of products or a business who advertise to multiple audiences should use a third party platform lie Adroll or Perfect Audience.
How to set up remarketing?
Before you start advertising, you need to install a tracking pixel on your website so that Facebook can start recording visitors to your website.
Implementing remarketing code is pretty simple.
Firstly, you need to go to your Facebook Ads Manager and navigate to Audiences.
Select create audience.
Select “Custom Audience From Your Website.”
A box will pop up that has your remarketing pixel. You (or your web developer) will need to copy and paste this code on your website.
Once installed, we suggest letting the list build for a week or two.
Once your list has some numbers behind it, segment your audience according to interests and start creating your ads.
What we don’t know?
We currently are not sure how big the remarketing list needs to be before it will fire. Therefore it’s wise to let that list build and go back and check your list size.
Typically, with 3rd party platforms like Adroll & Perfect Audience your ads won’t show very much until your list size reaches 1,000 visitors. That means you need to get a lot of traffic in one month for it to be effective.
We are currently about to trial a campaign to see how long it takes for remarketing ads to show.