How To Set Up A Custom Audience On Facebook

Setting up a custom audience can sound like a daunting task, however within Facebook business manager or ads manager sections they make it quite straight forward and really quite easy. (if you know where to begin!)

The first thing you need to do is to login to your Facebook account and find your way into the manage ads section.

You're now looking for the option "audiences" and to find this you need to pull out Facebook full ads manager menu, the icon for this is located on the upper left-hand side of your page right next to the Facebook logo.

Once you get onto the audiences page you then need to locate the blue button that says "create audience" hitting this button will bring you up a 3 option menu, Saved audience (this allows you to create an audience based on things like behaviour or interest's or location and even sex or age) lookalike audience (which allows you to create an audience based on the type of people in another audience.) and custom audience, this is the one we want for now.

Once you click "custom audience" you will be presented with your create a custom audience window which lets you set the rules that people will need to meet before being placed into this particular audience.

There are various options here however we suggest that you first set the option of “people that meet ANY of the following criteria” to ALL, this will mean that ALL of the options you enter here will need to be met before a user is placed int this custom audience.

You can then set the “website views” option to “visited a particular web page” this gives you much more control and you can either add full URL’s into the field below or you can simply enter a word that the URL must contain. If you’re using your purpli account to create retargeting links you should add the shortened PURPLI URL identifier here which is PURP.LI (this will link this custom audience on Facebook to your purpli account).

You will then need to hit the “and also” text to apply another identifier, this identifier will need to match at least one of the tags you enter when you create links using your purpli dashboard. It could be anything, it could be DOGS for example which means every link you create at purpli with the tag DOGS will help to send people into this retargeting group on Facebook.

There’s also the option to adjust your time parameters here however its always a good idea to allow users that have not engaged with your tag for a long period of time to drop out of your retargeting (no point in send ads to people that are no longer interested right?) I know what you’re thinking, once a dog person always a dog person however what if the tag was wedding-venues and you were advertising your wedding car hire service, these people may now be married (or not, break ups happen all the time #justsaying) So a little of track however you get the point, don’t be one of those advertisers that retargets for a whole year after a little interest has been shown.

Now all there is to do is to name your audience, something like “people that LOVE dogs” would be great, then describe the audience (for your own reference really, a good marketing plan may have hundreds of these so its good to keep track with just a brief glance) a description may read, people that have shown a interest in dog related articles within the last 30 days.

Now simply hit create audience and sit back whilst Facebook starts populating. If you have already shared links with the tag and its within the time parameters you have set, Facebook should add these people to your list within a few hours, they will continuously update your list and ads that you set to use this list will be served to all of the people that meet your criteria, cool right!

Now all that’s left to do is to grow your list by creating more links using this audience tag! What are you waiting for? Get back onto your Purpli Dashboard and start creating links right now!