Retargeting and custom audiences in Meta ads

Author

Andrew Southworth
September 02, 2024

Happy Labor Day!

Today we’re going to talk about retargeting with Meta ads.

Retargeting is when you show your ads to people who have previously interacted with you in some way. For example, showing ads to people who have watched any video on your Instagram page in the past 90 days, but that don’t follow you yet.

When you run ads to people who have never heard of you before, you’re targeting a ‘cold audience’. This is the opposite of retargeting, which is a ‘warm audience’.

In Meta, we build retargeting audiences with custom audiences. Then inside of campaigns we can target these custom audiences inside of our ad sets.

Before we dive in… if you haven’t yet, consider registering for my free music marketing summit here!

How to build custom audiences

Let me walk you through how to build a custom audience. First, go to audiences inside of Meta ads.

Then, click on create and choose custom audience:

There are many audiences you can create, but for now i’ll choose Instagram.

I’m making an Instagram followers audience so i’ll choose that and then name it…

There are many other types of custom audiences you might want to use. Here’s a list of some common good ones:

  • IG / FB followers

  • IG / FB engagement

  • Smart link conversions

  • Website visitors

  • Pixel purchase events

  • Video views (15s view, 25% view, etc.)

  • Customer list (uploading your email list)

You heard right, you can actually upload your contact list to Meta and retarget them on Facebook / Instagram.

Where To Use Retargeting

There are many situations you can use retargeting to achieve better results. One of the most valuable applications of retargeting i’ve seen is for touring. It is very difficult to convince someone who’s never heard of you before to come to your show (possible, but hard). With retargeting you can show your ads to people who already interact with you, and who live within 30 miles of the venue.

Some other applications are for email list growth, merch sales, Patreon sales, song promotion etc.

It’s worth mentioning that retargeting audiences don’t always outperform cold audiences. The quality of your custom audience matters a lot, and your custom audience is likely very small compared to the size of your cold audiences which can cause higher auction rates.

Over time you’ll accrue a larger and larger retargeting audience, and hopefully a high quality one as well. This often means the performance of your retargeting audiences improves over time as well, but also that if you’re new you might not use retargeting at all for a while.

There are certain things you mostly advertise to warm audiences and other things you’d mostly want to advertise to cold audiences.

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