My 24 Hours Income Team Impact: Save Time and Effort With Facebook Saved Audiences

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Save Time and Effort With Facebook Saved Audiences

Planning campaigns, hunting down creative, editing the creative to fit social media platforms, planning daily budgets, working on audiences, etc., etc.: There are a million things that need to be done with each new campaign, so are shortcuts welcome? I say yes.

One of the ways that I save time and effort is building out Facebook saved audiences. These do take some time to build out initially, but you will be thanking yourself in the future when your client or boss asks you on a Friday afternoon to build out a campaign that needs to be launched by the end of the day.

You may already know what saved audiences are, but for those that haven’t delved into these before, except to create lookalike audiences, they are premade audience targeting that you can simply insert into your ad sets in the future. The only caveat is that you cannot exclude these audiences from your targeting, so think carefully how you want to go about it.

Here are some tips that I have found to be useful over the years of saved audience building:

First and foremost, know your audiences and document them on an Excel sheet.

This may seem like a “duh” statement, but when you are targeting females age 25 through 45, you want to know what their interests, behaviors, buying habits, etc. are so that you can create a custom audience and feel comfortable that it is different than your females age 45 through 65-plus targeting.

Some of the time, your client will have some ideal audiences and demos that you can use, but if not, I suggest digging into their Google Analytics account to find the demos that are interacting with the business.

Next, you will want to hop into the audiences tab in the ad account you are working in. If you do not have any lookalike audiences, you will want to create some. I suggest referring to this article on what the best ones are to have in your repertoire.

After you have a number of lookalike audiences to choose from, click “saved audience.”

The build-out that pops up should look pretty familiar if you have created ads in the past.

Once you are in here, go ahead and choose one of the audiences in that Excel sheet mentioned earlier and choose a lookalike audience to base these around. I always suggest using a lookalike audience as a base to filter down from because the Facebook algorithm is pretty smart about narrowing that massive U.S.-wide (or whatever country you are in) potential audience down to a couple of hundred thousand.

You now have your lookalike audience in there, so just go through the normal steps of choosing the age and gender, interests, behaviors, purchasing habits, income, etc.–whatever you have in your Excel sheet, really.

After you have filled out the necessary information, click “create audience,” and it will be available for you to use in future ad sets. How do you do this?

It’s simple: You just hop over into Power Editor to the ad set level of a campaign and have an option in the audience section of the build out to choose custom audiences. Click on the option box, choose custom audience and it will be in there.