Social Retargeting with Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook has recently rolled out their Custom Audiences feature to all their users. You can now target ads on Facebook by uploading a list of email addresses, Facebook IDs, mobile ad IDs or phone numbers.

This new feature gives marketers a hyper-targeted channel for advertising. You get to advertise for almost nothing with CPM as low as 7 cents and CPC that’s not much higher.

Potential Uses

Some of the uses for Facebook Custom Audience ads are: target customers for up-selling, turn email subscribers into Facebook page fans or try to re-engage dormant subscribers who have been ignoring your emails.

How to set up Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook Custom Audiences is really easy to use.

1. First log into the Facebook Power Editor
2. Then upload your list, it will need to be a list of either email addresses, Facebook IDs, phone numbers or mobile ad IDs
3. Expect match rates around 30 – 50%* (see our test results below)
4. Read through and make sure you understand the terms of use – basically that your uploaded list is from an opt-in database
5. That’s it, now all you need to do is create your ads

Our test results for matching data with Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook will only find a match if the data you provided matches information found in a Facebook account.

Some reasons for Facebook not finding matches:

• Users registered with a different email than what you uploaded (ex: registered to Facebook with a personal/gmail email address & you have their work email)
• You only have a phone number that isn’t in the person’s Facebook profile
• You have other data, but not email or phone number

Our tests

We ran a test with 3 different samples of emails to see how well Facebook could match them. Facebook’s matching rate ranged from 13 – 43%.

• Samples A: a mix of personal & work emails
• Match rate: 43%
• Samples B: personal emails
• Match rate: 32%
• Samples C: work emails
• Match rate: 13%

Eating our own dog food

Since we sell a people search API, we thought we should check to see how we can improve the match rate. We assumed that we had some emails that weren’t directly registered to a Facebook account, but the owners of the emails did have accounts.

Below you can see the results of adding our Search API results to Facebook Custom Audiences.

1. Uploaded Sample A (work & personal emails) – Facebook match rate of 43%
2. Enriched Sample A with our API to find the Facebook IDs that Facebook couldn’t match
3. Uploaded the found IDs – Facebook match rate of 50%

Outcome: we were able to increase our custom audience by over 16% using our API.

Worth a Try

Facebook Custom Audiences give marketers a relatively inexpensive channel to target their email list. It’s a simple enough campaign to run with little risk and much cheaper than traditional CRM retargeting.