Facebook custom audiences are a powerful marketing tool, as they allow to run retargeting campaigns.
Retargeting campaigns show ads to those people who already visited your website - which likely increases the conversion rate and ROI of the ads.
Setting up a Facebook custom audience, therefore, is the first step you have to take.
Before I show you how you can do that, let me explain what's going on when you're building a Facebook custom audience of your website visitors.
If you know that already, feel free to skip this section.
Facebook allows you to create Custom Audience Pixels, which essentially are code snippets you have to add to your website.
Whenever someone visits your website that Custom Audience Pixel connects to the Facebook servers and analyzes the website that was opened.
You can specify rules for your audience - e.g. age, gender, location ... - and Facebook matches your visitor against these rules.
If the visitor matches your rules, he's added to your custom audience on Facebook. Now you can run ads specifically for that visitor.
See how powerful Facebook Custom Audiences are?!
They are a great way to increase the ROI of your Facebook ads because you run ads only to people who already know who you are (or at least saw your website).
Alright, now that we covered what these pixels do, let's see how you can create them.
First off, login to your Facebook account and go to facebook.com/ads/audience_manager.
There you'll see a blue button that says "Create Audience."
On click, the button shows a drop-down menu. In that menu, you have to select "Website Audience".
Now you can specify the filters and name for your audience. You can set:
After finishing that setup process, the new Custom Audience shows on the top of the list of all audiences.
The only thing that's missing for now is the tracking code for the Custom Audience Pixel.
Here's how you get it:
Click on the newly created audience and go to "Edit".
Then click on the "Settings" icon at the bottom left and click on "View Pixel Code".
Now you should see the full code of your Facebook Custom Audience Pixel. And that's the exact code you have to integrate to your website.
Copy that code to your clipboard or paste it into a text file. You'll need it in a bit.
We're done in Facebook, now let's head over to WordPress and integrate that code into the website.
When logged in to your WP-Admin area, go to "Plugins" and install a free plugin called "Tracking Code Manager".
This plugin allows us to add all kinds of tracking codes to the website and manage them easily.
Once installed, go to the plugin settings and click on "Add New". You'll see the following window:
Here's how to configure the fields:
Name:
Give your tracking code a name, so you can easily identify it. I'd suggest "Facebook custom audience" in this case.
Paste your tracking code here:
This is where the Facebook Custom Audience Pixel code goes.
Position in the code:
Leave this to "before ".
Where do you want to add this code?
Decide whether to add this code on all pages of your website or just on selected pages. The first option is for building a general custom audience; the latter is for specific funnels.
In which page do you want to insert this code?
Select whether the code is embedded on all pages/posts or just on specific pages or posts.
That's it 🙂
It's quite straightforward to configure the Tracking Code Manager and to use it to add Facebook Custom Audience Pixels to your WordPress site.
And those pixels can be a game changer for your sales funnel!
Now, here's an additional step to make sure the Custom Audience Pixel is set up properly:
Facebook has a tool called FB Pixel Helper that checks the configuration of all pixels on your website. You can simply Google it and install it as browser extension.
When opening your website, you can use that browser extension to verify that all pixels are working.
Also, make sure that in the FB manager the pixel is set to "active".
