Blog

You have already set up your Facebook campaign, you have managed to get a few conversions but now you want to target only those people who have not taken any action on your capture page. How do you do that?

Showing your ads to people who have already filled your lead form or made a purchase on your site is not only a waste of money but can also be annoying. What you need is a customized audience so that your ads show only to those people who are left to take any action.

That is where you use the Facebook Custom Audience with Exclusion Targeting.  Exclusion targeting is quite simply excluding those people from seeing your ads that have already completed a specific action on your website.

For example, if a customer has already reached your landing page and purchased a product, you would now want to exclude this person from that same advertisement on Facebook and other partner channels. You could then add an exclusion rule to the Facebook audience so that your ad doesn’t reach anyone who has landed on the ‘Thank You’ page.

Is this confusing? Don’t worry, I have added screenshots below, so by the end of the post, you will know exactly what to do and how to do it.

Full disclosure here, I am going to show you only one aspect of creating a custom audience, however, if you learn how to do this one, you can further refine and experiment with the other features on your Facebook Ads Manager to suit your business goals.

Step 1: Login to your Ads Manager Account

Once you log in, select the 3 horizontal lines icon on the top left and then select all tools

Step 2: Click on the Audiences Tab

Once you select All tools, you then need to select the Audience tab on the right-hand corner.

Step 3: Click on Create New Audience

Then click on the ‘create a new audience’ button. It simply means that we are creating a specific audience to target.

Step 4: Choose Website Traffic

You will get multiple options to choose from here. Currently, I will be showing you how to create a custom audience by choosing the ‘Website traffic’ option however you can choose other options as well depending on your goals.

 Step 5: Select the include people parameter

Once you select the include people who meet the following criteria, select the ‘ANY’ option.

Step 6: Select the People Who Visited Specific Pages Option

Click on the tab that says ‘all website visitors’ and change it to ‘People who visited specific pages’

Step 7: Change the URL section to ‘Equals’

When you change it to URL ‘equals’, you’re telling Facebook to show your ads only if the user reaches a specific page and no other page because every page has a unique URL.

Step 8: Add the Exact Page URL & Name that Audience

For example, if I want to target users who have visited the ‘Hire Me’ page of Rightly Digital, I would then enter this URL: https://www.rightlydigital.com/hire-me/ and name that Audience as ‘Hire Me Section Visitors’

Step 9: Select the ‘Exclude’ Rule

By clicking on the ‘exclude’ option, you’re further narrowing down your targeting by telling Facebook to exclude audiences who have completed a certain action.

For example, when a user subscribes to a course and reaches the ‘Thank You’ page, you would want to add the thank you page in the exclude option

Follow the same steps and change the criteria to ‘equals’ and then enter the ‘Thank You’ Page URL ( Or whichever page you want to include)

And then click on Create Audience and you’re finally done. Now it may take some time for the audience to populate. But once the audience is created, your Facebook Ads will target only those people who have visited one specific page but not completed an action, by reaching on the ‘Thank You’ page.

Conclusion

Facebook custom targeting can save you a lot of ad spends and at the same time narrow down your target as well. The steps might seem a bit overwhelming at first however once you get the hang of it, you will notice a high-quality lead count.  So don’t waste your time an add facebook custom audiences to your marketing mix.

Odell Dias

Odell Dias is the founder of RightlyDigital.com where Online Marketing concepts are made easy. He has over 6 years of experience in the Digital Marketing industry, helping brands and individuals alike to achieve their marketing goals. He is known as one of the best digital marketing freelancers for small-to-medium-sized businesses.