I’ve been a huge advocate for Facebook advertising. These are inexpensive online marketing tools for small business owners and the platform continues to create more sophisticated features. My favorite is not new, but it is high quality – the custom audiences. Custom audiences have a few ways to target users, but, for those trying it for the first time, I recommend the option to import a customer list. It’s simple – users import an email list and the ads are served to the people on the list who have a Facebook account associated with that email address. (I list the step-by-step instructions below).
We’ve recently employed this feature for two different ad options – a ‘likes’ ad and a boosted event post. Here are the results…
Ad type: “Likes” Ad (Promote Your Page)
Emails imported: 7253
Emails used for Facebook: 4700
Ad reach: 1591 people
Results: 197 new likes
Total spent: $31
Ad type: Boosted post (Page Post Engagement)
Emails imported: 5001
Emails used for Facebook: 2400
Ad reach: 647 people
Results: 27 post likes, 19 link clicks, 2 shares, and 1 page like
Total spent: $15
What I love about the latter is the option to ‘invite’ people to like the page who interact with ad. Simply click on the people who ‘liked’ the ad, and select the ‘invite’ button to the right!
Here’s how to import the list to set up the custom audiences ad:
Step 1. Go to the ads manager drop down and select the ‘Audiences’ button, select ‘create audience’ then ‘custom audience.’
Step 2. Select the option for a customer file, then load the list of your contacts. Allow Facebook a few minutes to load the list. You’ll receive a notification once it’s ready. Then, begin to set up your ad as you normally would, but this time you can select your custom audience from a list rather than set up the traditional ad targeting parameters such as interests or demographics.
Have you tried the custom audiences feature on Facebook? What were your results?
