1. Define Custom Audience
FEE’s retargeting is based on three data sources:
- Website visits to specific domains or web pages. For this example, we are tracking visits to http://www.feecon.org/ via a Facebook Pixel tracking cookie. Some of our website audience originates on other organizations’ websites and are anonymously shared with us.
- Membership in email lists, including FEE Daily or audiences shared with us by partners. (Facebook allows audience sharing without sharing any individual email addresses.)
- Online and offline transactions. If you purchase something from our store, register for an event, or make a donation, you’ll eventually be imported as a Custom Audience for retargeting.
Here is how we’ve defined the audience for all FEEcon.org visitors during the last 6 months:
2. Create Saved Audience
We’ve created a custom audience of FEEcon.org visitors, but we don’t necessarily want every visitor in the audience to see our ads. In this step, we’ll exclude people who have already registered for FEEcon, and set an age range so we can create different ad sets based on age.
Below, we’ve included all FEE.org visitors, and excluded everyone who’s already registered and does not match the specified age range.
3. Use Saved Audience in Ad Set
Now that we have the target audience defined, we can use it in ads sets. I suggest that you create audiences before you create ads. You don’t want to spent a lot of time creating an ad only to learn that Facebook (or Twitter, etc) either cannot target the audience, or that it is too small.
The strategy below is the same as a traditional essay outline:
- Show an ad that tells the customer what they’re going to see
- Show them the product on the landing page (and capture them via a Call to Action)
- Retarget them with an ad reminding them about what they saw.
- Young professionals (the audience definition actually has 12+ “secret sauce” criteria)
- Young people who already visited our landing page
- Current FEE supporters who might be interested in FEEcon
- Current supporters who have already visited FEEcon.org
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