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with Custom Audience on Facebook Advertising on social networking sites is taking giant strides. Despite this impressive

advancement, several brands and marketers are still facing difficulties to find the right audiences,

particularly on Facebook, the web’s most effective advertising platform currently. But, with the

introduction of Custom Audiences, Facebook has offered advertisers a very powerful marketing

tool. Custom Audience on Facebook allows advertisers to target their ads to users through

email IDs, phone numbers or Facebook user ID. Isn’t that something?

And, just in case you have missed this, here’s a complete guide to custom audience on

Facebook, steps to help you create custom audience and its benefits to marketers.

What is Custom Audience on Facebook?

Marketers can target their ads to a specific set of Facebook users using their Email IDs,

Facebook IDs, phone numbers or application IDs.

Like the term suggests, custom audience is a set of people who are ‘customized’ to view your

ads. On Facebook, being able to ‘customize’ your audience means that Marketers can target

their ads to a specific set of Facebook users using their Email IDs, Facebook IDs, phone numbers

or application IDs.

This is how Custom Audience on Facebook works

Let me explain this to you with this image below:

Like you see in the image below…

a. You have a database of User ids of your existing customers.

b. You upload this list as a CSV or TXT file onto Facebook.

c. Facebook hashes (secures and encrypts) and matches this data against the data that

Facebook already has. How? Most people use their personal ids to log into Facebook.

d. User IDs that match from your database and the database that Facebook has, you get your

Custom Audience.

(I know, some of the above mentioned terms may sound high tech, fret not! I have explained the

entire process in detail below).

Very briefly, what is hashing?

Hashing is a way to secure information and compress it. Like Wikipedia puts it, hashing maps

data of variable length to data of a fixed length. In short, hashing is used to get short output data

that acts as a shortened reference to the original data. It also secures the data and makes it

‘private’.

You need not worry about privacy, the user ids, email addresses/phone numbers are hashed or

encrypted before being sent to Facebook.

However, here are the rules that you need to follow before setting your custom audience on

Facebook.

How to Create a Custom Audience on Facebook?

Step 1: When you go to your Facebook’s Ad Manager, on the left hand side you will find the

‘Power Editor’ tab. If Power Editor has not been installed on your computer, you will see this

window wherein you will be asked to Download it.

Step 2: In order to set your custom audience, you have to have knowledge of Power Editor,

Facebook’s bulk ad editing too.

If you don’t know how to operate Facebook Power Editor, here’s a guide.

Step 3: Within Power Editor, you will find a Create Audience tab. Click on that to begin the

process of creating your Custom Audience. When you click on the Custom Audience tab, you

will be asked to accept the terms and conditions. Click on ‘Accept’ to take the next step.

Step 4: Next, name your audience and add a description (keep the name and description as

close as possible to your campaign to prevent confusion later). Select a file from your computer

– email addresses, phone numbers or Facebook ID’s and upload it. (Make sure that it is a CSV or

TXT file with only one column).

Step 5: Facebook will hash the audience list which you have provided to the existing profiles.

(this number can be lower than your original list because some people may not be highly active

users or some may not be using the same email id/phone number that you have provided).

Step 6: Once the file has been uploaded successfully, click on ‘Create’ button to create your

custom audience. This can take a really long time, so be patient. You will see the following

message.

Step 7: Once your file has been uploaded, your campaign status will show ‘Ready’.

Step 8: Okay, now that your Custom Audience is ready, lets put it to use in an ad! Click on the

Audience button on your left hand corner. You will see this window. Like any other Facebook

ad targeting, give a name to your ad, add a specific location, age and interests of your target

group. After all the filters have been set, the number you see on the right (highlighted in red) will

be your target group.

Step 9: For further targeting, click on the Advanced Options tab under Audience. You will see

the following screen. Choose your custom audience from the lists that you have uploaded. These

are the people who will be able to view your ad. The next column is that of ‘Excluded

audiences’.

Step 10: Once you have accomplished all the steps, you are good to go!

How can Custom Audience on Facebook be beneficial to marketers?

Save time &

money with

‘Excluded’

Audience

There may be many people who are already your existing customers or may

have already purchased the product that you are placing an ad for, why

would you want to show them your ad? Hence, if you put them in the

‘Excluded Audiences’ category, Facebook will refrain from serving them

your ad. This saves you from shelling out more money in PPC ads.

Get more

Facebook likes

This one is pretty obvious, isn’t it? Now that you can target offline

Facebook users who have not liked your page, your likes will automatically

increase once they see your ads.

Drive more

Conversions

Say you are a business which collects email addresses for lead generation.

Why not upload them on Facebook as your Custom Audience? You can then

serve your ads to this set of people who are more likely to convert.Here is

an example: Lets say you have a list of students who have purchased

Physics study modules from you. Now, you have launched a new product

which is study modules on Chemistry. Create an ad on Facebook to target

people who have purchased the Physics modules and alert them of the study

material on Chemistry. The people who have already purchased Physics

need not be your Facebook fans, they already trust your product. Hence,

they are more likely to convert than any other user.

Get more Signups If you send newsletters to customers on a regular basis, extract the email of

list of people who haven’t signed up for the newsletter yet. Upload that

group as your Custom Audience. You can then serve ads promoting your

newsletter and how useful it is to those customers.

Since this is a new addition to Facebook’s targeting options, the more number of times you upload your user list, the more

people you gather in your custom audience list. So, say for example, you upload a list of 5000 user Ids. The first time you

upload it onto Facebook, you see that Facebook has been able to match say 1200 User IDs. When you upload it once

again, Facebook matches 2200 User IDs and this goes on and on each time you upload the file. However, we are not yet

sure as to how many times you can upload the file onto Facebook.

How to Get Facebook User ID’s ?

Here’s a Powerful tool, which can extract Facebook user ID’s from yours competitors FB page for example http://www.socialleecher.com Very use-full think.

Have you started using Custom Audience on Facebook yet? Share in what ways do you plan to

use it? Do leave me a comment. Happy targeting!

Visit Facebook Custom Audience Tool …