Building audiences on Facebook is not nuclear physics, but with the sheer number of targeting options available, it can seem just as complicated.
In order to recoup the money invested in Facebook ads, you need to focus your budget so that only relevant and qualified audiences see your ads. But how do you set up an audience for Facebook ads, regardless of industry or business type?
This article explains how Facebook targeting works, how to optimize your ad sets, and how to use Facebook Audience Insights to learn more about your potential customers.
Introduction to Audiences for Facebook Ads
Most people don't go to Facebook with the intent to buy something.
But on Facebook, with its huge amount of information, users usually do not have such intentions.
Facebook doesn't even offer targeting by keyword. You need to define an audience in order to show your ads.
But this does not mean that Facebook ads are useless, quite the contrary. It offers a ton of opportunities for B2C and B2B advertisers alike. Facebook allows you to get engaged customers for your product or service and nurture them with dynamic, engaging content from the first interaction to the day the deal is closed. It works great for creating brand awareness as well.
Of course, such an effective result requires a detailed understanding of your audience and how to target it.
This means striking a balance between broad and specific audiences, and turning your Facebook ad campaign into its own marketing funnel.
Now we need to take a closer look at what is meant by “broad” and “specific” audiences.
Targeting a wide audience
Best for new campaigns, brand awareness and data collection. You can use Facebook ads to target all two billion users with a single offer.
But this is not called “targeting a wide audience”, but “stupidity”. Instead, you need to reach out to a core audience (created using Facebook match or targeting options) to show the brand to new ones. potential buyers. Here is an example of a content offer from a wide part of the sales funnel: 
Broadly targeting people on Facebook with a tertiary interest in digital marketing and giving them this ad can help you learn about their needs and start building more relevant audiences.
Broad targeting means trusting one of the richest entities on the planet to algorithmically determine which subsets of humanity might be eligible for a product or service.
While it can be scary to cast a wide net, this approach can help you find potential customers that you might never otherwise reach. You can also use data from a broader audience to formulate a more specific audience further down the funnel.
Using overlapping demographics and psychographics, you can create a new, optimized core audience.
Facebook Broad Audience Targeting in Action
For example, the company sells high quality winter hats to people in the United States. They are woven from the most silky alpaca yarn. Attached is a neat little leather patch emblazoned with a hipster logo.
They retail for $59, which is a steal given the stylish simplicity of this handcrafted piece. 
The company hopes to take its luxury winter hat brand to the next level. It's time to start spreading brand awareness, and there's no better way to do that than with Facebook ads.
Now, it would be foolish to target people of all ages from the US… 
While the ad might appear in the newsfeed of an Iowa grandmother looking for a Christmas present for her Somerville-based grandson, the ad won't be relevant to every American. This complete lack of targeting is akin to running football-themed ads during The Bachelor.
But launching a branding initiative in select areas and to a specific age range... 
…this is a phenomenal way to increase brand awareness among potential customers.
Now a few caveats
You won’t be able to work only with this targeting all the time. It is used to collect information to create more target audiences for a more creative and engaging ad.
By combining this information gathering and brand awareness strategy with sales-focused targeting, you can create a steady stream of leads. This shouldn't take up a significant portion of the overall advertising budget, but setting a small percentage of Facebook spend will allow the business to benefit from Facebook's advertising algorithm intelligence.
Who Should Use Facebook Broad Targeting? Everything!
Unless you have to deal with an extremely tight budget, broad audience targeting will open the brand to new potential customers: people who would not have known about it in any other way.
However, the ad and offer must take into account the lack of intent to buy from a general audience. The goal here isn't to sell a hat or close a deal today, it's to gain exposure and fill the funnel.
After that, it will be possible to create new core and custom audiences, pushing Facebook users to buy as the company learns more about their characteristics, wants and needs. 
Even though engagement may be higher when using broad targeting (simply due to the number of people reached), the majority of your Facebook ad budget should be for target audiences that can be associated with actual business value. Talking about it...
Target audience
The advertiser gives Facebook a strict set of parameters that will show the ad to fewer users compared to broader targeting, but who are more likely to buy the product.
Several ways to define more specific audiences:
- Check the list of positions most likely to be filled by potential clients, pairing it with attraction to vegan pizza and The Clash, and then overlaying all of this into specific locations.
- Use custom audiences based on actions taken on the site, such as registering for a webinar or downloading content.
- Create a 1% Lookalike Audience using your highest-grossing customers as your source audience.
This (and a literally endless combination of other targeting methods) can help you skip a few steps between a potential customer thinking “hmm, that looks cool” and entering a credit card number.
According to Facebook, audience targeting “can reduce the potential audience, but narrow it down to the people most interested in the product or service.” 
By greatly reducing the number of people in each audience, you can target your ads to the characteristics and activities of your target group, improving your chances of success. Of course, in this case, coverage will also decrease significantly.
Therefore, it is very important to connect a wide and specific audience, using the former to direct new potential customers to the latter.
Facebook Audience Targeting in Action
As you already know, there are countless ways to build an audience on Facebook. “Targeting” does not necessarily refer to the use of custom or lookalike audiences, but rather refers to a well-defined group of Facebook users.
Basically anything that takes control from Facebook and can turn it into: 
In it:
Can be defined as "targeted" audience targeting. The three main ways to achieve this are layered targeting, custom audiences, and lookalike audiences.
Layered targeting
Facebook allows you to layer numerous targeting options on top of each other to create new audiences.
The advantage of this is obvious: you can build your ad around the overlapping characteristics of a small audience to show potential customers that this product or service appeals to their particular need. 
For example, if a company sells insurance to homeowners, it will need to look for people who have recently bought a home. But to be more specific, you can use a layered audience to create variants of a new homeowner audience based on characteristics such as home type (apartment, co-op, etc.), home value, and household composition. 
This ad, for example, would be suitable for people who have just bought a bungalow, but are completely broke.
By segmenting recent property buyers into segments using layered targeting, the company will show completely different ads to a young couple buying one-room apartment in Brooklyn, a family of eight from the Midwest, and a recently divorced man with a beachfront villa in Malibu.
These person-specific ads can compensate for the lack of intent on Facebook users by supporting conversions in the middle of the funnel.
Custom Audiences
Facebook's targeting options may seem limitless, but sometimes it's better to build an audience based on actions rather than characteristics.
Custom audiences allow you to target Facebook users based on:
Of the four possible sources for individual audiences, the most valuable without a doubt are the user file and website traffic.
It's worth noting that Custom Audiences are often the smallest you can create on Facebook. This prevents Facebook from serving ads unless they reach higher levels engagement with the audience - as reflected in, 
The "individual" component of individual audiences is somewhat questionable, especially when it comes to file uploads. You can download any available list mailing list and reach Facebook users with matching email addresses.
This can be used to incentivize existing customers to make a higher purchase, offer a product demo to people who have downloaded certain content: the possibilities are endless. The same goes for custom audiences based on site traffic; all you need to do is use Google Analytics to identify the pages that people visit most often, place the Facebook pixel on those pages, create an audience, and show ads that detail the content that potential customers have viewed.
While custom audiences are usually limited in that you need to download a list or find users based on their site or app activity, Lookalike Audiences simply group together users whose characteristics are similar to the selected source audience. The degree of their compliance can be changed from 1% to 10%. 
“Source Audience” can be any already created Facebook audience; however, to maximize their value, you will have to use converters (based on the Facebook pixel) or custom addresses Email.
It is useless to create a lookalike audience if the person sees the ad a second time while also being a member of one of the larger audiences.
Who Should Use Target Audience Targeting on Facebook? Everything!
After explaining the differences between broad and specific audience targeting on Facebook, it's time to give you three tips for using them most effectively.
1: Reach statistical significance as soon as possible (and act accordingly)
Statistical significance is the point at which enough data has already been collected to make an informed decision about a job. This is important for both broad and specific audiences, but for different reasons.
With a wide audience, you need to quickly identify and use statistical significance to avoid overspending on displaying your ad to uninterested Facebook users.
In this case, Audience Insights can be an invaluable tool in your arsenal. 
When it comes to specific audiences - those meant for quick conversions - targeting and ads based on performance will ensure that a small and valuable audience doesn't get frustrated with your marketing efforts. This The best way determine if the audience is right, and subsequently begin the endless process of optimizing the conversion rate.
Now it might be tempting to split your campaigns into dozens of ad groups based on this information. According to Facebook, this is not worth doing:
You want to segment your campaign into many small ad sets to see which one performs better, and then use that as a model for future ad sets. However, with such large number ad groups, you are unlikely to get a statistically significant number of results for any of them.
Too wide and the ad turns into white noise. Too narrow and the statistical value is out of reach. Instead, it's better to use engagement data from broad and specific audiences. If something doesn't work, you can use Audience Insights to fine-tune your targeting and re-engage potential customers.
Sources such as comments on posts, activity on a Facebook business page, or random email addresses are not suitable for creating Lookalike Audiences.
It is impossible to know if these characteristics represent the business value that one would like to reflect. But this is not the only problem. Lookalike audiences are usually smaller than broad, core audiences. 
In essence, using them can narrow Facebook's ability to deliver ads to the most relevant users in each audience. This is not a problem if it is known that the majority of the audience consists of bona fide potential customers, but do not limit yourself when this can be avoided.
Instead, use your most valuable sources to create Lookalike Audiences. You can use the Facebook pixel and your own CRM data to separate interested people from those who have already paid for the product or service.
Experienced advertisers with massive amounts of data can take this insightful attitude up a notch. Separate customers and significant customers (who spend the most) and make lookalike audiences for both groups. The first can function as a general audience, the second as a specific one.
3: Quality is more important than size (Especially in the case of individual audiences)
This echoes the last point, but it's worth repeating: quality over quantity. Dot. One of the main ways to determine quality, besides conversions and revenue, is Relevance Score. 
Relevance Score is a measure of quality on Facebook and the engagement rate of ads. Relevance score is important because it determines both the cost per click on Facebook and how often an ad is shown.
From the editor: It is a pleasure to present the graduate of the academy and her first article. Moreover, she wonderfully complements Pavel Beskhitrov.
LAL, lookalike, lookalike audiences are all names the best tool for targeting on Facebook and Instagram. It works based custom audiences for remarketing. These audiences are collected considering a number of criteria from different sources.
What are audience selection criteria? Custom and similar audiences allow you to work with hot and warm, potentially interested audiences. The maximum hit in the target (English - target).
. Custom Audiences- these are remarketing audiences in which your former, current or potential customers gather: visitors to a business page or website; people who interacted with your content and/or completed targeted actions.
. Similar are audiences created based on a specific source (custom audience). People included in such a list are as similar as possible to the source by many criteria, for example: gender, age, geo, interests, online behavior. Similar Audiences - effective tool in targeting, they allow you to show an advertisement to exactly the audience for which, most likely, the offer will be relevant.
How to create custom audiences?
Custom audiences are created from a variety of sources: a website, an Instagram business profile or Facebook page, your personal customer data files, and so on. Based on such audiences, similar audiences are created that correspond as closely as possible to those people who have already interacted with you.
You can start working with audiences by going to the Ads manager https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/- Facebook Ads Manager. In the "Resources" tab, you need the "Audiences" item.
Then, click "Create Audience" → "Custom Audience".
We select the collection criterion we need:
1. File with data about the client.
2. Website traffic.
3. Actions in applications.
4. Engagement (Both Facebook and Instagram since the last RK update).
Method 1: Client data file
This option is ideal for those who have enough initial data on existing customers.
1.1 There are 15 different IDs available. Often several are used at once, for example: name, email, phone number, city / country.
IMPORTANT: Don't be lazy to read the hints that Facebook offers! The screenshot below highlights important points that you need to familiarize yourself with before creating an audience based on your customers' data. See the recommendations and download the file template. By the way, a common mistake is the wrong format of the uploaded file, you need CSV (Excel) or TXT (plain text file).
1.2 Users of the MailChimp email marketing service can log in to upload their customer addresses and match them with Facebook users.
1.3 New in working with customer data: customer value file life cycle(LTV). Facebook is committed to ensuring that you target your ads as accurately and effectively as possible.
Method 2: Website traffic
The perfect way to "catch up" with people who have visited your site social network. Remarketing (retargeting) in this case allows you to return your current or potential customers who visited any or the page of the site / blog you specified within a certain time.
The 1st option involves collecting each user who visited ANY page of the site. It is recommended to use the 2nd option and manually enter the site URL:
Depending on your product/service, you need to choose the period of time for which the collection will take place. Maximum possible meaning: 180 days. You can create multiple audiences. For example, if you assume that your product may be needed again by the buyer in a week (dog food, for example), the period will be 7 days. After a few months - from 60 days and above.
The 3rd option helps to collect the audience that visits certain pages. In this case, you can exclude people who visited other URl. For example, you want to show your ad only to people who have placed an item in their cart but haven't completed their purchase. So "thank you page" will be in the exceptions.
The 4th option collects an audience of people who did not visit the site for up to six months + those who were, but did not return.
In all 4 options, the minimum time period is 1 day, and the maximum is 180 days.
Method 3: Actions in applications
Everything is extremely simple here: create an audience of people who have installed your application or game. By making a lookalike audience (more on that later), ad performance can improve significantly.
Method 4: Engagement
Lists of people who interacted with your content on Facebook and Instagram (as of July 2017, not all ad accounts have received this update, which allows collecting audiences from Instagram business profiles, so be patient).
The easiest to use are the points: 4.1 (video), 4.5 (Facebook page), 4.6 (Instagram business profile). They allow you to collect the largest audiences, since, in principle, fewer advertisers use the lead generation tool and the canvas.
IMPORTANT: Some points can be used for both social networks, some - only for one of them.
But first things first.
The future of video content is here. It's no secret that Facebook prefers this kind of content in its algorithms. In addition, many have already understood the importance of live broadcasts as a way to communicate with the audience.
How to use it for your own purposes?
This method allows you to create audiences of people who have watched your videos. The most non-targeted will be 1 list, in which the degree of viewing is only 3 seconds. Due to the autoplay of the video, the assembled audience will be the least engaged. The most targeted will be the 6th list, in which the video has been watched almost completely. Who will watch the video at 95%? The one who was interested in him.
At this point, it's a good idea to create multiple audiences with different view depths to test the size of your original audience. Also, you can separately choose from which video (one or several) and from which social network the data will be collected.
The period of time for which the analysis of views is possible is limited to 1 year (365 days).
4.2 Lead generation form (Facebook and Instagram) Lead generation is one of the goals in the Republic of Kazakhstan, which allows you to collect user contact information (this is how landing pages work). Since all actions take place inside Facebook, it is possible to track everyone who interacted with the form.
You can include some forms in an audience and exclude others. The maximum period is 90 days.
There are 3 options to choose from:
Everyone who opened the form;
Those who opened but did not send;
Those who opened and submitted the form.
4.3 Canvas (Facebook only)
What is a canvas and where to create one?
Go to your Facebook business page and select "Share a photo or video" (see screenshot).
Select "Create Canvas" from the list that appears.
You can also create a canvas in Ads Manager or Power Editor. For those new to this format, it is recommended to use templates.
Choose a canvas;
Include the audience that opened the canvas or clicked on any links in it;
The required time period is a maximum of 365 days;
4.4 Facebook page (only Facebook, actually)
This option is ideal for those types of businesses or people who do not have their own website / blog, but are represented only on Facebook. Remarketing, as a tool, can return not only site visitors, but also people who visited a page on a social network. Data from these custom audiences is well suited for creating and targeting Lookalike Audiences.
First you need to select a page (if you have more than one) from which the collection will be carried out. By what parameters? For everyone!
Everyone who interacted with the page: were on the page and interacted in some way with it or with ads;
Any visitor: everyone who was on the page, even if he did not interact with it in any way;
Those who clicked a call to action, for example: learn more, call, write a message;
Only those who wrote posts to the page;
Only those who saved the page or any publication (the most quiet ones who prefer not to give themselves away in any way, but save the materials they like).
The maximum period is 365 days.
An individualized audience of the Facebook page was created, and on its basis - a similar one.
4.5 Instagram Business Profile (Instagram only)
I observe that many entrepreneurs prefer to be active in only one social network. When business profiles appeared on Instagram, many preferred them because of the statistics. Because of this, many “blank” pages have appeared on Facebook that are simply linked to Instagram, but no activity is being carried out.
The ability to collect an audience of people who visited the Instagram profile and / or interacted with it appeared relatively recently and is not yet available in all advertising cabinets. Tip one is to wait until the update reaches you.
A little more about laziness: Facebook wants you to invest in ads. The more successful your campaign is, the more money you will be willing to give in order to get a result. To do this, Facebook leaves hints everywhere. Arrows point to them in the screenshot above.
All of the above custom audiences can be used for remarketing on both Instagram and Facebook. And this is a very cool way to target Instagram ads to those who are most likely to follow you. Question: “Is it possible to target Instagram ads to your followers?” - one of the most common among people who decide on paid promotion methods on Instagram.
You can make exceptions when creating an audience. For example, you don't want to show ads to people who have DMed you in the last 60 days because most of them have become your customers, and you want to reach all the other people who visited your business profile and didn't place an order.
In the same way, you can target Facebook remarketing to those who most closely interacted with the Instagram business profile: wrote messages or saved any posts. Why exactly these parameters? It's simple: due to mass liking and mass following, the statistics of interactions with the profile and its visits can be violated. But automation services do not save posts to bookmarks and for the most part interested persons write to direct, so individualized audiences on these indicators will be the most targeted.
When an audience is created, a red indicator lights up in the "Availability" column, as the audience has not yet been filled. It takes a minimum of 20 people to make it green and allow you to continue working with the created audience.
Like this: 1100 Instagram profile visitors found. Now it is possible to run ads on them or create the most similar audience, much larger in size. So how do you create a Lookalike Audience? We return to the “Create an audience” section and select the item we need:
In the column "Source" choose any of the individually created audiences described above.
For example, you are an online store selling your products through Instagram. All questions about the purchase are resolved through Direct. This means that these people are not just interested in your product, they are solvent and some of them are already your customers.
In the column "Place" select the country in which we want to find a similar group. For example, Ukraine.
In the column "Audience size" selectable from 1% to 10% total population country. At the same time, 1% is the audience closest to the source.
IMPORTANT: Once a Lookalike Audience is created, its size can't be changed, so it's a good idea to create multiple audiences at once. To do this, open the advanced options and make the appropriate settings:
Example, 3 audiences at once;
1% - an audience of about 100 thousand people will be collected;
3% - another 200 thousand more;
6% - overall size an audience of approximately 600,000 potentially interested users.
The higher the %, the more blurred the audience is.
Below is an example of audience scaling for a sportswear brand account:
Custom Audience from point 4.5 (Involvement - Instagram) gathered 2400 people - account visitors.
Similar Audience: Ukraine, 1% of the population. The predicted audience size was 99.9 thousand people, in fact it turned out to be 103.3 thousand. There is no point in expanding this audience yet.
IMPORTANT: to use an audience as a source for creating a similar audience, it must have at least 100 people from the same country. BUT, this source does not have to contain people from the country that we have chosen for targeting.
For example, our sports brand is a domestic manufacturer. Most of the buyers are from Ukraine. We want to select Belarus as a country for targeting. It will look like this:
Estimated coverage at 1% - a little more than 10 thousand people. Just in this case, it is advisable to increase the size of the audience:
The difference is obvious.
What actually happened? We collected an audience interested in the product in one country and created a similar audience in another.
How will they be similar? For sports topics at least:
Gender - in Ukraine, mostly women buy;
Age is the most active segment of this brand: 25-34. This means that in Belarus the age indicator will not change the vector towards 50+. The audience will also be young.
Interests: it's more complicated here. Of course, “sports” can be the main one, but in addition to this, Facebook will analyze what other interests this group of people had in common. For example, they may be in love with rock music or cooking. In Belarus, these patterns will also be monitored.
The above is very general and rough indicators, Facebook analyzes many connections and patterns, on the basis of which it creates the coveted “Lookalike” audience. This is the work of algorithms based on artificial intelligence.
INTERESTING: By creating several similar audiences, you can see the degree of their intersection.
To do this, we tick off up to 5 audiences of interest to us, with a size of more than 1000 people. In the example, 2 similar audiences were selected: one based on all interactions, the other - those who wrote in direct. Both audiences are about the same size.
Then select "Actions".
"Show Audience Overlay":
Conclusion: ⅓ of these similar audiences overlap.
CONCLUSION:
Create custom audiences for remarketing on Instagram and/or Facebook;
Attract new customers with Lookalike Audiences. Such ads to a “warm” audience are often much more effective than manual campaigns that shoot into the unknown.
Open new markets around the world with Lookalike Audiences.
Compare created audiences for overlap and merge them if necessary.
Experiment and test! And the target will develop successfully.
Launching remarketing in AdWords starts with Analytics, namely, with the creation of audiences. Today we'll show you how to create remarketing lists in Google Analytics and use them for your AdWords campaigns.
Things to check before working with audiences
First of all, check if data collection for remarketing is enabled. To do this, in Google Analytics, open the "Administrator" section, then - "Resource Settings" - "Tracking" - "Data Collection".
If the feature is not active, enable it and save by clicking Done. After that, the system will begin collecting information to create remarketing audiences.
Also note that your AdWords and Analytics accounts must be linked. If you haven't already, use our .
Creating Audiences
From the "Administrator" section, go to "Resource Settings", then - "Audience Settings" - "Audiences".
To create a new audience, click on the red "+Audience" button, then select a view.
The next step is to define the audience. The system will offer you several templates:
For each type of audience, you can set refinement filters: specify gender, age, device type, etc.
After choosing a template, give the name of the audience and click "Next". Now you need to specify in which accounts you publish the audience. To do this, click "Audience goals" - "Add places".
Let's talk more about the audience types that you can use to set up remarketing in AdWords.
Audience types in Google Analytics
Let's list the templates that Google offers. The first three audience types are quite broad:
- All users- those who have ever visited your site have cookies or advertising identifiers. The system automatically creates this audience. It is rarely used in remarketing, especially if the site has a lot of traffic, as it is too broad and generalized. Remarketing, on the other hand, works well when the audience is segmented and sees ads tailored to their interests.
- New Users- those who visited the site once.
- Returning Users- those who visited the site several times.
The following audience types are more commonly used in remarketing. With their help, you can create more complex scenarios and reach the relevant audience.
smart list
In this case, the system automatically collects transaction data and uses machine learning to determine which users are most likely to convert the next time they visit the site. To determine this, Analytics uses a lot of data about the user: geolocation, device, browser, last session duration, etc.
What are the advantages of using smart lists:
- Saves time creating a list, as there is no need to configure anything.
- The criteria by which users get into the list change daily, so the audience is constantly updated and remains relevant.
But keep in mind that Analytics doesn't always use your site's data to create a smart list. The system uses resource statistics if at least 500 transactions are made on it per month, and the number of sessions is from 10,000 per day. If the indicators are less, then the lists are formed based on data from similar sites. Therefore, smart lists should be used by e-commerce advertisers who already have stable traffic to the site and enough conversions. Also, this option is suitable for those who do not have enough experience in setting up remarketing.
Users who visited a specific section of the site
You can target not only those who visited the entire section, but also users who visited certain pages. Click on the list "Users who visited a specific section of the site", a window will open.
The default condition is "Page contains \". This element contains all pages of any site, which means that all visitors to the resource will be included in the list. To change the settings, click on the pencil icon on the top right.
In the "Page contains" field, add a URL fragment to indicate a section of the site, or a full address if you want to target an audience that has visited only one specific page. For example, we need to reach users who have read articles. To do this, in the "Page contains" field, enter "/articles/".
To make the system take into account only one specific page, you can set the condition "Page exactly matches". But then problems can arise if you add UTM tags to the URL, the system may not take into account the desired page.
You can also add additional filters to narrow down your audience. For example, select only those users who spent more than 30 seconds in the specified section or page. This means that they have shown interest in the content on those pages. To do this, click "And" to the right of the field in which you entered the URL and specify the desired condition.
Next, specify the membership period - the time during which the user will be present in the list if the configured condition is met. The number of days depends on the specifics of the business. For example, a user makes a decision to buy clothes no more than a week, and the transaction cycle in the field of auto and real estate is up to six months. Analytics has a special report - . With it, you can track how much time it takes on average for a potential client to make a decision to purchase your service or product. Keep this information in mind when setting your membership period.
Then enter the name of the audience. After that, select the AdWords and Analytics accounts in which you will use the audience and click "Publish".
Users who reached the goal
To create such an audience, you must first set up goals in Analytics. When creating a default audience, the system substitutes the last of the configured goals.
To select another, click on the pencil icon. A list of targets will open, select the desired one.
Then save and customize your membership period. Enter the name of the audience (most suitable option names - by purpose).
After that, select the AdWords and Analytics accounts in which you will use the audience and click "Publish".
Users who made a transaction
This list is used to advertise online stores or services that accept payments on the site. To create it, the e-commerce module must be configured in Analytics. You can offer related products to these users in your ad, remind them that they have already bought from you, or provide a discount for re-ordering.
Custom Audiences
In addition to the templates that Analytics offers, you can create your own audience based on ad objectives and target audience. Here are some examples of custom audiences for e-commerce sites.
Regular customers
This category includes users who have made several transactions on the site. These people are already well acquainted with the brand, appreciate the quality and service, they just need to be reminded that the company remembers them, appreciates and wants to be useful. Regular customers can be divided into categories:
- With a check above average. These are users who buy in bulk or purchase expensive items. Promote them exclusive products from the catalog, the price of which is higher than the average.
- With a check below average. Such users can be attracted by discounts, promotions, information about sales.
In general, for all users included in the category of regular customers, you can advertise special promotions and discounts for regular customers, talk about new products in the range.
New clients
These are the users who made only one transaction. The purpose of advertising is to turn these people into regular customers. You can remind them that they have not been on the site for a long time, show related products or services in addition to those already purchased. If you have a loyalty program (bonus, savings, discount cards), offer to join it. So you increase the likelihood that the client will return to you and buy again.
Potential clients
This category includes those who viewed sections with goods or services, but did not convert. To direct your ads to this audience, create a list of people who have visited certain sections or pages (for example, a catalog or a specific category of products). You can then specify exclusion conditions:
- Were on the product pages, but did not put the product in the basket. Exception condition - clicked on the button. These users can advertise products that they viewed but did not add to their shopping cart.
- Added an item to the cart but did not complete the order. In this case, the checkout page and thank you page can be exceptions. You can offer the user a discount or report a profitable promotion for a product.
If the site does not belong to the e-commerce area, you can create audiences from users who were on the site but did not convert: they did not fill out the form, did not register on the site, etc. To do this, you can use the “Users, achieved the conversion goal. For example, set up remarketing to users who visited the page, and select those who reached the conversion goal as an exclusion condition. Thus, ads will be shown to those who were on the page, but did not convert.
You can find other examples of custom audiences for advertisers from different topics in .
Once you've completed creating your audiences, go to AdWords and go to the "Audiences" section. The lists you created in Analytics should appear there. They can be used for remarketing in the display network or search, target ads to users from the list, or, conversely, indicate them as an exclusionary condition. Test different remarketing scenarios and ads for each audience and turn website visitors into customers.
You can use the default audiences developed by Google Analytics, create your own, or import any of the existing segments as the basis for a new audience. Once created, the audience will appear in all the accounts you select and you can use it in campaigns and experiments.
ContentHow to create an audience
To create an audience, follow these steps:
- Go to the Admin tab and select the required resource.
- In column Resource click Audience Settings > Audiences.
- Click + AUDIENCE. Choosing a New Audience Configuration
- By default, the audience is created based on the data in the current view. Users filtered from the view will not be included in the audience.
To select a different view, click Change, select a view and click Further.
- Define an audience. The following options are available to you:
Regardless of how you create an audience, you can estimate its size in the section Users in the last 7 days. This is the number of visitors for the specified period who meet the given conditions. Please note that projections based on this data are approximate.In most cases, the number of users in your Google Ads remarketing list will be less than the total number of site or app users because not everyone has cookies advertising preferences or mobile advertising identifiers. For example, compare the size of the remarketing list All users with indicator Users in the Analytics report Audience Overview.
Google Ads remarketing lists for display and search ads can also vary in size, even when based on the same audience. Listings for media advertising are often larger than the remarketing lists for search ads, as they can include users by age, gender, and interests.
- When lists are created using data that is passed to Analytics using the Measurement Protocol (Analytics 360 and Standard) or query-time import (Analytics 360 only), users who have not visited the site are added to remarketing lists for search and display ads. over 30 days ago.
- Please note that sampling in Analytics does not affect the number of users that meet audience requirements, unless you manually configure it using the sampleRate (analytics.js) or setSampleRate (ga.js) function, in which case the sampling is performed before the data is sent to our system. Sampling in Analytics can affect your audience size estimate, but not the audience itself.
- Data retention period determines how many days the user stays in the audience. You can set any value from 1 before 540 .
- Enter the name of the audience and click Further.
- In chapter Audience Goals click on the drop down menu Add places and select the accounts that will use the new audience. This can be an account for advertising on the search and display networks (Google Ads with Display Network Ads, Google Ads with Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, Display & Video 360, and Google Ads Manager), as well as tools such as Google Optimization that allow you to use audiences for experimentation and personalization. If you have a Google Ads manager account, that will also be on the list of eligible locations.
Audiences with age, gender, or any interest category can only be used in Google Ads(for display advertising) and Analytics.
If the audience filter is set to "Sequences" in the audience settings, then it cannot be used in Analytics.
- Click OK > Publish.
When you create an audience, data from the last 30 days is added to it (or less if data is available for a shorter period), so the list can be used right away.
Audience editor (no filters)When you have finished setting up the list, click the button Apply.
Audience DefinitionIf you have audience exclusions set up, an additional checkbox will appear to temporarily or permanently remove users from the audience.
If your audience definition contains user-level filters, you will have access to lookback period (days). When this feature is applied, all users who met the audience criteria in the specified period will be added to the audience the next time they start a session on your site.
How to import a segment
You can import a segment and use it to create an audience. Click Import segment, and then select one of the options available for that resource.
How to change the audience
How to close, delete, or reopen an audience
Closing an audience stops adding users. However, users in this audience will still see ads until their membership expires.