Ever since Facebook updated their organic posting algorithm in 2015, receiving any meaningful type of engagement was just about impossible.
Spending hours per week posting organically was also a waste of time as you’d reach less than 2% of your entire audience, while one paid ad would reach everyone.
But now Facebook has released Page Engagement Custom Audiences, allowing you to create audiences based on actions made by users on your Facebook Page.
Why page post audiences are awesome
There are three reasons this new custom audience is awesome:
Organic posting is relevant again – Posting organically on your Facebook page now makes much more sense, as you can segment users who have engaged with any of your content into ad audiences.
Stronger top level funnel – Page engagement audiences will be much stronger than if you just used a lookalike audience and interest targeting as they have already shown an interest in your brand.
These leads are of a higher quality than generic targeting and will ultimately lead to a higher conversion rate.
Tip: Page engagement audiences are ideal to serve ads at the top of your funnel as they have interacted with your page, but not visited your website. When running ads to this audience, be sure to exclude all other audiences (website custom audience, customer lists, purchases etc.) to reduce any overlap.
Don’t serve this audience your main offers; treat them like they are cold traffic.
Retarget ad views – In the past, if a Facebook user commented on an ad or clicked your brand name to visit your page but didn’t end up on your website, you couldn’t place them into any audience. With these new options you can retarget users who interacted with your paid ads even if they never ended up on your website.
What audiences can you create?
To create engagement audiences on Facebook, head to Audiences in your Business Manager, then Create Audience, and then select Engagement on Facebook from the drop-down list:
Then select Page:
You can create a custom audience around:
- anyone who visited your Page;
- people who engaged with any post or ad;
- people who clicked on any call to action button;
- people who sent a message to your Page; and
- people who saved your Page or any post.
Unlike website custom audiences, you can target page audiences for a maximum of 365 days.
How to build these audiences
Organic posting is great if you have 30,000+ fans on your page, as you’ll be able to fill your page engagement audiences quickly with a decent amount of users. But if you just have a few thousand fans, you can’t really scale ads with an audience size of 2,000 or less.
So how do you fill page engagement audiences with warm leads?
Page Post Engagements (PPE) – For the longest time, PPE objectives weren’t all that useful as you couldn’t retarget anyone who clicked your image, and many opted to use the website clicks objective instead.
With this new update you can start combing awesome creatives with PPE to build strong page engagement audiences. PPE typically costs less per action than website clicks as you don’t send the user off Facebook, making it a good substitute to build top-of-the-funnel audiences.
For brands that sell tangible products, now is the time to start taking awesome photos with catchy taglines that will get Facebook users engaging.
Lookalike or page audiences for top funnel targeting?
If you currently have less than 10,000 subscribers in your email list, your lookalike audiences are not really going to be that strong as Facebook doesn’t have enough data to find similar users.
In these cases, it has now become very viable to allocate a small part of your marketing spend to build up page audiences who you can insert at the top end of your funnel.
With organic Facebook posting starting to become more relevant again, how are you going to incorporate this new feature to your marketing strategy in 2017?
If you aren’t sure how, then contact us today for more information.