July 22, 2015: Custom Audiences represent one of the most interesting innovations in ad technology in a long time. They provide something very useful to marketers: an improved alternative to HTTP cookies, whose value as targeting vehicles have declined in recent years due to cookie deletion, ad blocking, and the growing adoption of smart phones, which preclude their effective use.
But Custom Audiences — which use e-mail or app ID identifiers — are not subject to these limitations.
Facebook pioneered the concept of Custom Audiences, launching its product in 2012. Marketers seeking to use Custom Audiences on Facebook simply upload lists to the service (for example, customer/subscriber email addresses, phone numbers, app user ID numbers, or Facebook IDs), allowing these lists to be matched against Facebook users. The result is a Custom Audience that can be targeted, retargeted, and optionally used as the basis for populating a “Lookalike” audience (a group of people whose characteristics are similar to those of individuals in the uploaded list). According to Adobe, using “lookalike” audiences has produced a 3X improvement in conversions against ordinary Facebook targeting for one advertiser.
Because there are a lot of marketers for whom the concept of Custom Audiences is not yet familiar, Didit has created a new eBook that will walk you through the process of setting up Custom Audiences and discuss the best ways to use them in your paid social campaigns.
