Patience, sometimes it’s not everyone’s strong point. Particularly if we’re eagerly awaiting results from our hard earned money we’ve just handed over to Facebook. In this article, I’m going to cover how you can speed up the impact of your new Facebook Advertising campaigns. When most businesses first think about targeting for Facebook Campaigns, your mind usually goes to other pages their customers like, behaviours they perform or where they live. And while that’s useful, they’re missing out on potential audiences that are right under their noses before they even get to this stage.
Making use of these audiences can not only improve the immediate results you get from your ads, but also deliver further insights and data that Facebook can take advantage of in other campaigns you’re running on the platform.
Let’s break this down into the 3 simple steps, Setup, Creation and Implementation
At the Ad Set level, you can choose the conversion event you want to optimise for in your campaign. This would most likely be the purchase event, but you may need to optimise for a step before that event (EG Add To Cart, View Content) if Facebook doesn’t have enough data to send traffic likely to perform that event. You also select the custom audience you want to target at the Adset level. You can target different audiences within separate ad sets so you can deliver specific messages to them. For instance, the message you deliver to someone that has abandoned their cart would be to come back and complete their purchase. This would be a different advertisement then someone that has viewed a product but is potentially not sure which one they want to purchase yet. Lastly, to make sure you don’t waste any money, be sure to exclude people that have purchased in the same time frame you’re targeting. If they have converted already, we don’t need to spend money on targeting them again.
Setup
Firstly, it’s imperative you have the Facebook Pixel installed. Ideally, you would have this installed for sometime before you begin with Facebook Ads. This will grow the size of the audiences we’re going to target in the implementation stage. With your pixel installed, set up your custom audiences to target. I would recommend setting up specific audiences that are closer to the point of buying and have triggered the following events:- View Content
- Add To Carts
- Purchase (so you can exclude them)
Creation
Now we need to create ads specifically for these people to help bring them back and continue browsing to complete their purchase. Remember, these people have shown an interest in your products but they just weren’t convinced it was the right time for them. When you think about what you might want to put in your ads, think about:- Their pain points that make them question their purchasing decision
- Why would they think twice about purchasing?
- Are there any logistical questions you need to cover that maybe they weren’t sure about? Shipping, returns and payment methods are always popular ones.
- How can you create a sense of urgency to get them to action?
Implementation
It’s now time to set up the campaigns to make the most of these audiences. The campaign objective should be conversions for these audiences. You want the objective to reflect the action you want them to take and in this case, that is completing your purchase.
At the Ad Set level, you can choose the conversion event you want to optimise for in your campaign. This would most likely be the purchase event, but you may need to optimise for a step before that event (EG Add To Cart, View Content) if Facebook doesn’t have enough data to send traffic likely to perform that event. 
You also select the custom audience you want to target at the Adset level. You can target different audiences within separate ad sets so you can deliver specific messages to them. For instance, the message you deliver to someone that has abandoned their cart would be to come back and complete their purchase. This would be a different advertisement then someone that has viewed a product but is potentially not sure which one they want to purchase yet. 
Lastly, to make sure you don’t waste any money, be sure to exclude people that have purchased in the same time frame you’re targeting. If they have converted already, we don’t need to spend money on targeting them again. 
