If you’ve spent any time running Facebook Ads or learning about them online, you’re probably aware of the advanced targeting options available through Custom Audiences. Custom Audiences allow advertisers to target people based on:

Customer Files

1. Email
2. Phone Number
3. First & Last Name
4. Address
5. Birth date
6. Gender
7. Age
8. Facebook User ID

Website Traffic

1. All website visitors
2. People who visit certain pages on your site
3. People who visit certain pages, but not others
4. People who take certain actions on your site
5. People who haven’t visited in a certain amount of time

App Activity

1. People who take certain actions within your app

Engagement on Facebook

1. People who watch a certain % of your videos

These options are incredibly powerful because they enable advertisers to hone in and customize messaging toward each unique group of users. You can then expand the reach of these audiences by finding people similar to those in the Custom Audience through Lookalike Audiences. These have been some of our most successful targeting types over the last few years since they were introduced.

Now Facebook has two new exciting opportunities for creating Custom Audiences. These are still in the process of rolling out to ad accounts so if you don’t see them in your account yet, reach out to us or check back in the coming weeks.

Time on Site

For content marketers and online publishers, being able to target by time on site is huge. You can now create audiences based on the top 5%, 10%, and 25% of your users based on time on site. For online publishers, this means you can create audiences targeting the most engaged segment of your traffic and deliver additional relevant content to them. You can also find more people similar to that group by creating a lookalike audience based on the top 5% list. We’re currently testing both of these strategies and finding success for our customers.

Engagement on Facebook

Earlier this year, Facebook added the ability to retarget users using custom audiences based on video engagement. So if you post a video on your Facebook Page, you can retarget people who viewed a certain percentage of it. Now they’ve expanded this technology into:

Lead Ads Engagement – For those of us running lead generation campaigns, you can now retarget / exclude people who have opened your form, opened and submitted your form, or opened and did not submit your form. We’re testing this by retargeting users who opened and did not submit a lead form and we’re serving them standard link post ads and video ads in order to engage the user differently since they expressed interest but did not convert.

Canvas Ads Engagement – Similar to the new Lead Ads Engagement options, you can now retarget / exclude users who open your Canvas or who click any links in your Canvas. We’re testing this with a strategy similar to our Lead Ads Engagement strategy – targeting people who opened but did not convert and serving a different ad type to them.

We’re thrilled with these new targeting options – not only does it mean we have more ways to drive success for our customers, it’s good for Facebook Advertising in general as it enables advertisers to deliver more relevant and timely ads that will improve the user experience for all of us.

What are your thoughts, are you testing these new targeting options? Let us know in the comments below!