Facebook takes Custom Audiences international

September 9, 2016:  We’re big fans of Custom Audiences, a segmentation tactic that lets marketers leverage their first-party data to target and reach relevant audiences on social networks. Currently Facebook (which invented them in 2012) offers them, and so do Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google.

Custom Audiences put a marketer’s hard-earned first-party data to work. For example, an e-commerce business may already possess lists comprising thousands of email addresses of people who have actually bought the retailer’s product or downloaded an app. A B2B marketer likely maintains lists of qualified prospects who’ve attended webinars, downloaded e-books, or performed other actions involving an exchange of an e-mail address for a free good or service that can serve as a proxy for interest. Each of these lists can be used as the basis for creating a unique, pre-qualified online custom audience to be marketed against with great precision and at reasonable cost.

One of the more interesting ways that you can use Custom Audiences is to create “lookalike” audiences with the same essential characteristics as those of the individuals in your uploaded list, or those who visit your website (Facebook calls these “source audiences.”)  The result can be elevated click-through and conversion rates. According to Adobe, using “lookalike” audiences produced a 3X improvement in conversions against ordinary Facebook targeting for one of its advertisers, a finding supported by anecdotal reports from other marketers.

This week, Facebook announced that it was extending Lookalike Audiences internationally to 31 nations beyond the U.S. This will make it very easy for e-commerce marketers to quickly ramp up campaigns using their existing customer lists. As Facebook notes, “if you have a source audience of 10,000 people from Finland, you can use that to create a Lookalike Audience of similar people in South Africa.”

To encourage more marketers to consider running internationally-based campaigns, Facebook also published a “Cross Border Business Handbook” with specific consumer insights from Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the UK, plus basic best practices on how its ad units work. It’s also offering a series of webinars on international marketing.

Are you experimenting with Custom Audiences? You really should, because they’re such an efficient way to target, retarget, and “clone” audiences whose characteristics you already know. If you’re unsure how to begin, Didit has a handy e-book, Using Custom Audiences to Improve Ad Performance, that will get you up to speed in no time. You can download this free e-book here:

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