Curious about Audience Segments in your Meta Ads? Or looking for more control over exactly who sees your campaigns?
Introducing Audience Segments: one of the most powerful tools in your Meta Ads toolkit. If you’re running Sales campaigns with Advantage+ Audiences, this feature is a must-use for smarter targeting and better results…
We touched on Audience Segments in our blog, 5 Quick Wins to Maximise Meta Campaign Performance, but this powerful tool deserves a deep dive of its own.
Advantage + Audiences vs. Defining Targeting
Before we go into what Audience Segments are and why they’re important, we need to understand the different ways of targeting in Meta Ads Manager.
Meta targeting is a controversial subject: many believe that specifying targeting such as age, gender, interests and other demographics is no longer needed – we should let Meta use their Advantage+ audience to find our ideal customers. And others believe defining your audience, or at least giving ‘suggestions’ to Meta to put it on the right path, is still important
The honest answer from us (at the time of writing this) is that for the majority of our clients, Advantage+ audiences tend to win in tests vs. a defined audience using demographics and interests. Check out this case study from the ecommerce brand Freshwipes to see how Advantage+ audiences worked for them. Although it is important to say that it’s always worth testing, as you may be one of the few where defining targeting does work.
The only downside with using an Advantage+ audience is that you may feel that you have no control over who your ads are shown to. But, there is one important tool that allows you to take some of the reins: Audience Segments.
What campaign types are Audience Segments available with?
Audience segments are only available for use with either Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns or Manual Sales campaigns.
What are Audience Segments?
Audience Segments allow advertisers to easily analyse what types of customers are responding to their ads. There are 3 types of customers when it comes to Audience Segments:
- Existing Customers: Those who have purchased from you before (or recently)
- Engaged Customers: Those who have engaged with your brand in some way – this could be engaging with your social content or visiting your website
- New Customers: Those who have not engaged with or purchased from you before.
Why are Audience Segments important to use?
If you’re running Advantage+ Audiences, the more you can understand about who is responding to your ads, the better. Knowing this allows you to adapt your ads and strategy to be better aligned with your goals.
For example, if one of your key goals is to drive more first-time customers to purchase, you’ll want to ensure Meta spends more budget on ‘New’ Customers over ‘Engaged’ or ‘Existing’ Customers.
Or if you want to drive a higher Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), you may want to focus more budget on ‘Engaged’ or ‘Existing’ Customers as they’re typically easier (and cheaper) to convert into customers.
How to set up Audience Segments
To set up Audience Segments, you’ll need to build these in the ‘Audiences’ section of Ads Manager.
Let’s set up your ‘Existing’ customers first:
- Once in ‘Audiences’, click on ‘Create Audience’ and choose ‘Custom Audience’ from the dropdown
- Choose ‘Website’ from the ‘Your Sources’ section and click ‘Next’
- Make sure to choose the correct Pixel as the Source
- And then under ‘Events’ choose the ‘Purchase’ event (or if you’re not an e-commerce business, choose the event tied to being a Customer, i.e. Sign Up or Register)
- Set the Audience Retention – i.e. when they became a Customer or last Purchased. The maximum amount of time here is 180 days.
- Then name your audience something easy to understand, i.e. ‘Purchasers 90 days’.
Next, set up your ‘Engaged’ Customer audience. We typically recommend that only your website visitors should constitute your ‘Engaged’ Customers (although you may decide to have both website visitors and social engagers in here – if so, you’ll need to create a social engagers audience, too):
- Go back to ‘Audiences’, click on ‘Create Audience’ and choose ‘Custom Audience’ from the dropdown
- Choose ‘Website’ from the ‘Your Sources’ section and click ‘Next’
- Make sure to choose the correct Pixel as the Source
- And then, under ‘Events’, choose the ‘All website visitors’ option
- Set the Audience Retention – i.e. when they last visited your website. The maximum amount of time here is 180 days.
- Then name your audience something easy to recognise, i.e. ‘Website Visitors 90 days’.
When you’ve finished creating your ‘Existing’ and ‘Engaged’ Customer audiences, hop over to the ‘Advertising Settings’ tab from the left hand menu in Ads Manager. Here, you can tell Meta who your Audience Segments are:
- Once in ‘Advertising Settings’ click on ‘Audience Segments’
- Click on ‘Engaged audience’ and start typing in the name of the Engaged Customer Audience you just built and select it
- Next, click on ‘Existing customers’ and start typing in the name of the Existing Customer Audience you just built and select it
- Click ‘Confirm’.
And you’re done!
How to use Audience Segments
Once you’ve set everything up, from now on you’ll be able to see the breakdown of customers engaging with and converting from your ads. To see the breakdown:
- Click on one of your Sales campaigns in Ads Manager
- Choose the ‘Breakdowns’ tab at the top, and click on ‘Audience Segments’
- You’ll now see the breakdown of results from Existing, Engaged and New customers:
Here’s where you can gain some of that control back… If you want Meta to place more focus and budget on ‘New Customers’, use the Existing Customer Budget Cap in your campaign’s settings to decrease the percentage spent on ‘Existing Customers’.
And, if you want Meta to focus more budget on ‘Engaged’ or ‘Existing’ Customers, increase the Existing Customer Budget Cap.
Final Thoughts on Audience Segments
If you’re running Sales campaigns on Meta, Audience Segments are a game-changer. They provide valuable insights you can act on and empower you to optimise your campaigns for maximum impact and results.
