Audience Segments are a powerful feature for all sales campaigns, but far too many advertisers don’t have these set up — or they aren’t set up properly.
Here’s what you need to do…
Define Your Audience Segments
Go to your Advertising Settings and click on Audience Segments.
There, you’ll see sections for both your Engaged Audience and Existing Customers.
First, define your Engaged Audience.
This should be the widest net of people who have engaged with you before. Start with a website custom audience of all of your website visitors during the past 180 days. You can also use custom audiences for lead forms, your customer list, your app, and more.
Then define your existing customers, who are people who have bought something from you before.
Use every custom audience that represents your paying customers. Start with a website custom audience for all purchase events during the past 180 days. If you can segment your email list to isolate paying customers, use that, too.
In both cases, there’s no reason to limit the definition more than you need to. Include your entire email list within your Engaged Audience, not just certain segments. Include all purchases, not just purchases that happened recently.
Considerations
A couple of points to remember:
1. If a person is included in both the Engaged Audience and Existing Customers, they are only counted as Existing Customers. There’s no need to exclude people.
2. Some custom audiences (Facebook Page, Instagram Account, and Video Engagement, for example) are unavailable for Audience Segments.
Reporting
Once this is set up, you can breakdown results for all sales campaigns by audience segments. This allows you to see performance and budget distribution between your engaged audience, existing customers, and new audience.
This is super valuable insight, and it’s information that has helped transform my approach to targeting.
Learn more about Audience Segments here.
