Facebook Custom Audiences are a powerful and flexible way to target your Facebook ads to specific groups of users.  You can create custom audiences from email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs, mobile app user IDs, and even your website visitors.  In this post we are going to cover Website Custom Audiences from your website visitors and how they can be useful to you and your business.

What Are Website Custom Audiences?

Simply put, custom audiences are groups of Facebook users.  Once created, they can be used in targeting to deliver your ads to a focused audience.  Now through AdStage you can use the Facebook Remarketing Pixel and Javascript Tag API to track which users trigger remarketing events and webpage visits.  When you place the Remarketing Pixel on your website, Facebook will start to add users who match the rules you have set up to corresponding Custom Audiences. Then you can group those users using Audience Rules into Website Custom Audiences for use with Facebook ads.

How to Create Website Custom Audiences

Through the Facebook Interface

1. Visit the Audiences tab .

2. Click "Create Audience"

3. Choose "Custom Audience from your Website"

4. Accept the terms and create your pixel. Your pixel needs to be installed on your website between the between the head tags. You can verify it has been installed correctly with the Facebook Pixel Helper .

Next you'll define your audience (details below). For details, visit Custom Audience FAQs .

Through the AdStage Interface

1. Launch the Facebook Custom Audience Builder app

2. Click "Create Custom Audience"

3. Select the type "From Your Website Visitors"

Next you'll define your audience.

Ways to Define Website Custom Audiences

Most generally, you can create a Website Custom Audience that contains all your Website Users.  However, this can be too broad for some use cases.  Facebook offers 5 kinds of rules to drill into your visitors the way you want to.

By URL

Say you want to track everyone that hits your homepage, ‘www.adstage.io’, or everyone who hits a particular website, ‘http://www.adstage.io/features' or ‘http://www.adstage.io/pricing'.  You can use URL rules to match these URLs and segment those visitors.  This is a good, broad way to build audiences of your website visitors more generally.

By Domain

What if you only want to find people who hit pages on a certain domain.  Use Domain rules and match on ‘blog.adstage.io’ or ‘store.example.com’, rather than just your homepage to further segment those who visit pages on your different domains.

By Path

Instead of including a whole URL, you can match or even partial match on a url path. For example you could make a rule for any path that contains ‘signup’ and capture anyone on ’signup’ or ’signup/thankyou’ or ‘signup/payment’.

By Event (AdStage Exclusive)

More savvy advertisers and developers can utilize the Javascript Tag API to send Javascript events to Facebook and track specific events on their websites.  For example, a developer could send off a ViewProduct event using the Tag API every time a user views a product.  Using Events you can track individual actions users take on your website and put those users into a Custom Audience.  This, however, requires additional work to set up sending events to Facebook via their Javascript Tag API .

Custom Rules (AdStage Exclusive)

Custom Data should be used in conjunction with Events to segment visitors on an even more granular level. For example, you could pair ViewProduct with custom data like productId, category, or price.  Then you can create a Custom Data rule and filter for all prices greater than $100 or filter for the category ‘shoes’.  Now you can target different ads to users interacting with products at different price points or categories. Custom data is an extremely powerful way to target users who take actions on specific items on your site. This also requires setup and the Javascript Tag API .

Using different combinations of the above rules to create Custom Audiences will give you specific and flexible targeting that continues to stay relevant as more and more users visit and interact with your website.

To access event tracking for Facebook Website Custom Audiences, sign up for AdStage here!