Facebook™ advertising continues to lead as one of the most efficient and cost effective digital marketing strategies, even after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It had nothing to do with the businesses, marketers and brands that try to establish an open and honest relationship with consumers, and most Facebook™ users understood this.
This is why you should continue building ad campaigns and maintaining a budget for Facebook™ ads. However, one thing has not changed: there is fierce competition for ad space on the world’s largest social media platform and you need to spend your money wisely, by targeting the right people.
Today we will focus on a specific type of custom audience: your website visitors. First of all, you need to install the Facebook™ Pixel bot on your website. With this piece of code you can collect useful information about the behaviour of people on your site and then track them back to their Facebook™ user accounts.
Why Should you Target Website Visitors?
People who reach your website are no longer complete strangers: they have an idea about your brand name and the products and services you offer. They may just be curious to know more about your business because their friends bought something from you or liked your Facebook™ page. Or maybe they need products similar to yours and are in the scouting phase, comparing various offers.
Whatever the reason may be, you have a greater chance to get them started on the conversion path compared to people you target on Facebook™ based on demographic and behavioural factors.
Custom Audiences based on Website Browsing Behaviours
Now, let us get down to the nitty-gritty. The custom audiences based on website visitors should be split into different groups, according to a number of factors. These are:
- All the Visitors to your Website
This type of custom audience will help you reinforce your brand image among all types of website visitors, even casual ones. Making your brand name and logo easy to recognise is the first step toward building brand loyalty and converting prospects into leads and even customers.
To create this type of audience, access the Ads Manager section of Facebook™, navigate to the Audiences dashboard, click on Create Audience and select Website Traffic. This navigation chain is the starting point for creating all the specific website visitor audiences we will discuss in this article.
Once you have reached the window for creating the custom audience, you can include or exclude various factors, such as the last page they visited, the last time they browsed your website or the type of action they took. For the sake of relevance, you should not target website visitors who last browsed your site more than 180 days ago.
- People who Read your Blog
Blog readers may or may not be subscribed to your newsletter. If they are not, you have the chance to persuade them to do so with a Facebook™ ad. If they are subscribers, they may be ready to make a purchase if they receive a special offer, or ready to test a free trial of your services.
To create this type of audience, follow the steps presented in item 1 and include only visitors to your blog page from within a reasonable period of time (no more than 30 days in this case).
- People who Reached your Contact Page
If a visitor has gone straight to the contact page, or spent some time on this page after browsing your website, they may be thinking about getting in touch with your business. Either they have a question about the availability of a product, or they need more information about the features and benefits of a product.
Whatever the reason, these people should be reminded of your business with a Facebook™ ad. It may be the kind of prompting they need to actually make a purchase.
- People who have Abandoned a Shopping Cart
This is a classic group of website visitors in Facebook™ ad targeting. Most of the people who abandon carts simply get distracted and forget about completing the transaction. The Custom Audience section includes a specific function for targeting shopping cart abandoners. You can opt for the “Add to Cart” or the “Initiate Checkout” function in this type of targeting.
- People who Downloaded a Lead Magnet without Opting In
People are less and less inclined to subscribe in order to download a lead magnet, so many businesses stopped making this step mandatory. This change results in a group of people who download the lead magnet, but do not leave their email address to receive further communications from your brand.
To create a custom audience for this group, select the landing page URL for the lead magnet as the specific website page visitors have browsed in the panel for creating a custom audience.