tl;dr

• Bullseye Targeting: Unleash Facebook Custom Audiences for Turbocharged Ads Performance
• Hack Your Growth: Supercharge Custom Audiences with Scraped Facebook Group Members
• Unlock Success: Follow Our Step-by-Step Guide to Amplify Your Performance-Driven Marketing

Table of contents

• Introduction
• What is Facebook Custom Audiences, why it's important and how to use it
• How to use and growth hack Facebook Custom Audiences
• How to scrape Facebook group members for Facebook Custom Audiences

Introduction

With over 3 billion monthly active users spanning Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more, Meta (formerly Facebook) holds its undisputed position as the social media giant. Its advertising platform remains unrivaled in terms of return-on-investment (ROI), making it an indispensable component of any serious business's paid marketing strategy. However, recent developments such as Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) change with iOS 14, and Europe's Digital Services Act (DSA), have left a notable impact on the performance of ads targeting across these online platforms. The restricted access to valuable user data, including interests and ads conversion, has undoubtedly affected the effectiveness of ads targeting - this is often referred to as Signal Loss in the ad tech world.

These Signal Loss changes pose a significant challenge especially to small businesses and brands heavily reliant on performance ads, unlike larger brands that predominantly focus on brand advertising. As the advertising ecosystem continues to evolve, navigating the new landscape demands a thoughtful strategy that can adapt to the current circumstances.

Amidst these shifts, one might wonder if the heydays of performance advertising are over, and whether performance-driven growth marketers must accept poorer-performing ads going forward?

At Rocketify, we firmly believe that, while changes in the digital advertising realm may present challenges, performance-driven growth marketers have ample opportunities to innovate and leverage new strategies to succeed in the ever-changing landscape. To support marketers navigating through these changes successfully, we are consistently evolving our suite of tools tailored to meet the demands of this changing advertising landscape.

In this post, we will be going over one such tactics - use scrapped Facebook group members' data to growth hack Facebook Custom Audiences.

What is Facebook Custom Audiences, why it's important and how to use it

Facebook Custom Audiences, as quoted from its official definition, is "an ad targeting option that lets you find your existing audiences among people across Meta technologies". In practical terms, this feature provides a way for you to leverage your existing audiences from website visits, app activities, or engagements across Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc) with fine-grained control. Marketers have achieved remarkable successes in terms of ROI and conversions by employing various tactics through this tool, such as:

• Retargeting Ads: Reach out to individuals who have interacted with your Facebook posts through likes, comments, or views, or have previously engaged with your ads.
• Segmented Ads Crafting: Tailor ads for specific segments of your audience, such as those on your bottom-of-the-funnel email list, ensuring a more personalized approach.
• Upselling Opportunities: Capitalize on the chance to promote new products to your existing customer base, thus fostering upselling potential.
• Lookalike Audiences Creation: Expand your targeting horizons by generating lookalike audiences, enabling you to engage with users who exhibit characteristics similar to your current customer base.

Given its immunity to Signal Loss and the granularity it affords users in terms of control, this targeting technology, when harnessed optimally, holds the potential to significantly enhance your ads' performance. Furthermore, it serves as a valuable growth hacking avenue, enabling you to connect with potential customers via laser-targeted ads, even during the initial stages of audience building. We perceive this latter aspect as a concealed gem, relatively unfamiliar and underutilized by many marketers, thereby providing your business with a distinct competitive advantage.

How to use and growth hack Facebook Custom Audiences

There are a few different types of audience sources to use Facebook Custom Audiences (as of 2023, you could navigate to Ads Manager -> Shortcuts -> Audiences -> Create a Custom Audience). Most of the marketers focus on 3 sources and we will use them as examples in this post. Remember that there's no right or wrong approaches so you should always focuses on what is right for your business:

• Website: your website visitors could be a great source for re-targeting ads campaigns through Custom Audiences. You would first need to install Meta Pixel (formly Facebook Pixel, we will post a detailed how-to on this topic at a later date). Afterwards, you could set up rules to create a custom audience, e.g. all website visitors, people who visited a specific page of your website, people who spent more than 45s on your website, etc. Experimenting with these rules usually yield promising ads performance improvements.
• Customer List: you could also bring a file (.csv or .txt) of your customers' identifiers, e.g. email, first/last name, facebook ids, etc, to match their information on the platform.
• App activities: in the age of mobile applications, your most valuable users often have installed your mobile applications. Similar to website traffic, users' in-app actions are another strong source for ads targeting.
• Meta activities: these refer to the actions people take across Meta technologies such as viewing videos, following a Facebook Page or opening a form in a lead generation ad.

Use Facebook Custom Audiences in your ads campaign is relatively straightforward, provided that you already have a sizable Custom Audiences source. Nevertheless, its also presents a distinctive growth hacking opportunity for small businesses grappling with limited existing audiences or enterprises aiming to substantially amplify their outreach through precision targeting. Specifically, we want to leverage the Customer List (a file of customers' identifiers, e.g. email, first/last name, facebook ids, etc). There are many ways to obtain such a hyper-targeted list without those users being your existing customers, since many of these user information are public, provided you know where and how to get them.

How to scrape Facebook group members for Facebook Custom Audiences

One particular source that we have seen quite a lot of success from is targeting users from relevant Facebook groups. With over 1.8 billion people use Facebook groups and tens of millions of groups, you could find relevant groups in almost every niche and the group members often have the potential to become high value customers due to their explicit interests in these topics. Moreover, since these group members are already on the Facebook platform, you are guaranteed to reach them through targeted ads.

Follow this step-by-step guide to create hyper targeted ads campaigns from relevant Facebook groups and maximize your ads performance

1. Find relevant Facebook groups: you could use the "Search Groups" functionality directly from Facebook with the keywords relevant to your niche
2. Join targeted Facebook groups: this is only required for private groups, but we would recommend you to do this for all the groups in your niche. This is a great way to get to know your audiences and you could leverage this channel for organic growth (this topic merits its own dedicated blog post).
3. Scrape group members information: there are a few tools available for this job. At Rocketify, we have created a Chrome extension specifically with the Facebook Custom Audiences use-case in mind, and a focus on data privacy so that your sensitive and valuable targeting data is never shared with us or anyone else. You could find more details and download this tool for FREE here.
4. Create Custom Audiences in ads manager: format the scrapped data following Facebook's formatting guideline, and navigate to Ads Manager -> Shortcuts -> Audiences -> Create a Custom Audience, to create a Custom Audiences.
5. Create targeted ads campaigns: once you created the Custom Audiences in Facebook ads manager, you could then create ads campaigns that use your shiny new target audience for fine-grained targeting and improved ads performance.
6. Profit!!!

As a bonus point, you may create look-alike audiences on top of these Custom Audiences to further expand and bootstrap your ads targeting to maximize reach and performance.