Facebook Custom Audience Lists: What You Should Know

ALERT! Facebook Marketing rookies and veterans! Facebook just sneakily… I mean “subtly” rolled out a new feature update that may have an impact on your methods and branding strategies. This updated Facebook feature is the Custom Audience List. This may have a significant effect on how you design your future Facebook Marketing stratagem due to the modified mechanics that influences how and when your audience sees your ads.

I can already hear the people at the back saying “why do they have to change things?!”
I know what you mean. Trust me. The idea of change is always good, but when you are used to how to do something or how something works, it is only natural to have some resistance. This is particularly true when it means learning and studying. I have just become comfortable with adopting and implementing the concepts and methodology of Rachel Miller’s “Moolah Marketing”. So any new development that might become disruptive to the current flow to how Facebook Marketing is done is not particularly palatable.

However, development and progress is a reality in any medium, and social media platforms (like Facebook) are no exception. And one thing we can do, as both potential clients and consumers, is to adopt and adapt new developments. This is the only way to keep you on top of the game.

According to Facebook’s development blog, part of addressing the political advertising concern will be to include more control in the hands of people to choose how advertisers will reach them. Note that this is not quite the same as the ability to hide all forms of ads in Facebook, which is a feature that has been active for quite a while. This can be from a specific advertiser. Or it can be multiple advertisers that the user allows to be displayed on your newsfeed. This older feature has been an option on the Facebook Ad Preferences.

On the other hand, with the new feature Facebook is adding will give the power to a Facebook user to stop seeing any number of ads based on an advertiser’s Custom Audience determined from a list. The list is provided by the client advertiser. The list is created by the client, which is generated from contact information from their prior customers, visitors to their home site, or from a customer relations management (CRM) database. Adding the Facebook Pixel to the advertiser’s home site helps with the hashing and facilitating the tracking. Basically, the Custom Audience list on Facebook will be comprised of people who already “know you”.

This can actually work both ways. This is because the advertiser can specify a user to not be included when ads are displayed. On the one hand, the advertiser can choose to exclude a specific viewer from seeing their ad (for whatever reason). However, this also means a user can choose to see the ad even if they are included in a list that the advertiser initially chose to exclude him or her.

The significance of this addition to the Facebook features cannot be ignored. Consider this: the Custom Audience feature will allow you to target specific people who have already visited your home site (thanks to the Facebook Pixel); this does not limit it to the home page, but visitors to any part of your website. You may even target visitors who have visited before, but have not returned for a period of time.

Now, you might think this is a negative. There might be the mentality that this will limit the scope of your ads’ Facebook audience reach. However, consider that you can also leverage this Facebook feature of Custom Audiences to target and retarget the active and inactive, potential or long-time customers. Facebook advertisers would now be incentivized to design their campaigns and adverts with the audience in mind. Because users can now opt-out or opt-in, your Facebook Marketing strategy will need to take this feature in consideration in building their brand. In a way, you will have a better idea of what message will work with the updated Facebook Custom Audience feature for your ads.

Like it or not, it will be fully implemented (during the first quarter of 2020). It would be best to be prepared for it. Learn everything you can on how you can apply it to your Facebook Marketing Strategy.

Whether you have your own strategy or you’re following Rachel Miller’s tried and tested Facebook Marketing strategies course, there is always room for improvement. Thankfully, the course is constantly updated with new developments like this.

If you haven’t seen Rachel Miller’s “Moolah Marketing” course for building an effective Facebook strategy, you can check my full review right here. I guarantee it is worth it!