With Facebook Exchange and Custom Audiences social advertising is set to be more relevant than ever

Digital marketers have been advertising on facebook for years now with the possibility to target ads to a certain group of people with specific interests. On the other hand, outside Facebook, they have been using other sophisticated targeting tools like “re-targeting” on Google, which means a promotional message can reach a specific niche of users who already demonstrated their interest in the service/product.

How re-targeting works: You visit an e-commerce site. You look at a pair of shoes you might like to buy. You decide not to buy them right then. You leave the  website. Later, on other websites you see ads with the pair of shoes you liked. I’m sure you’ve noticed this strange ads “following” you.

So now imagine, the Facebook ads targeting tools combined with a re-targeting option. Yes, this is a whole new level of online advertising and ROI!

In this way you can share a special offer with your most loyal customers. A sale for people who love a particular brand but haven’t visited in a while. Or simply grow your Facebook fan base with current customers, so that when you publish to them you’ll know you’re reaching people who actively engage with your business.

Basically you can reach your offline customers segments on facebook (if you have collect their data beforehand).

How does it work?

“Real-time bidding through the Facebook Exchange enhances Facebook’s ability to serve more relevant ads based on intent (cookie-based) data that advertisers own. Leading advertisers, audience technology players, and demand-side platforms use online, cookie-based user intent data to deliver ads to consumers in most non-premium online display advertising.”

• Scale » 955 million active users (June 2012), 57% of whom are daily users.
• Optimal targeting » Your own consumer intent data.
• Optimal objective » Campaigns with off-Facebook direct response objectives.
• Formats » Facebook Standard Ad driving off of Facebook. Page Post Ads and Sponsored Stories not included.

• Placements » Right-hand side. Home Page and News Feed placements not included.

An important change is that re-targeting will work with a third-party provider. Here is where you can find a full list of them: https://apps.facebook.com/pmddirectory/ and select More Options and click Facebook Exchange through Real-time bidding. 

Another new feature on Facebook advertising platform are Custom Audiences:

“Using email addresses, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs to make the match, it’s now possible to turn meaningful segments from your own customer database into custom audiences, in order to reach these specific people with highly relevant Facebook ads.”

It’s that simple:

1. You have a data base of users or preferably many with different clusters of users.

2. Upload them with facebook ad creation tool Power Editor. Power editor is a tool that is downloaded to your browser.

3. Customize your ads to match the different types of users using also the normal targeting options on Facebook.

Someone (especially the European Parliament) might rightfully ask: What does facebook with my clients’ database?  But everything seems to be legit. The contact list will be “hashed” directly on your computer. The hashed file will be then uploaded to Facebook’s API to be matched against hashes representing people on the social network. Facebook will not receive your clear text email addresses and doesn’t decrypt your hashes back into clear text entries.

I can’t wait to try custom audiences on Facebook.

Check out this article on Tech Crunch for more information and examples of use for Facebook Custom Audiences.