How to create custom audiences based on events on your website

Targeting people that already visited your website is always a smart move, but with the new Facebook Pixel, you can do much more than that. What you can actually do is to target (or exclude) people who performed a certain action on your website, like buying product X, or visited article Y, or contacted you and so on.

Facebook has changed the way Custom Audiences look and work. Here’s an updated article

What Are Standard and Custom Events

Standard or custom events are pieces of code inside Facebook Pixel that are telling Facebook that a visitor of your site has performed an action, like visiting a page or clicking a link. Every event can have parameters, an additional set of data that you can furtherer use. Let’s take for example a Purchase event (triggered when someone buys something from your website), it can have value,  currency, order id, but also items IDs. So when you are creating a Custom Audience you can tell Facebook that you are interested only in users that bought the item with a certain ID, or with a value bigger than $100.

Standard Events are a set of predefined events that Facebook uses. They  are nine, and PixelYourSite plugin has all of them available for selection.

Custom Events can be created by you and can have any name you like.

There are 2 ways an event can be triggered on your website:

Create Custom Audiences Based on Events

Facebook lets you create Custom Audiences, that you can define by various criteria. On important option is to use events, meaning that the audience will contain people that performed a certain action on your website.

Important: In order to use this tool you have first to set up events on your Website. You can do this with ease by using PixelYourSite plugin. It lets you define both events on page load and dynamic events. There is also a WooCommerce option that automatically adds all the necessary events with just a few clicks.

Once the events start to trigger, they will be available for selection in your Facebook Ads admin area. You can now start to use them in a very smart and efficient way.

Create a custom audience

  • In your Facebook Ads, click on Tools and then click Audiences
  • Click on Create Audience and then on Custom Audience

select-custom-audiences

  •  Select Website Traffic in the new popup that opens

website-traffic

  • Select Website Traffic: Custom Combination
  • Under “Traffic that meets the following conditions:” select Event
  • Put your cursor in the “Chose an event” field and a list of available events will open. Select the one you want
  • Put your cursor in the “Add a parameter” field  and a list of parameters will open. Select the one you want and define it
  • You can add new conditions in a similar way, or you can add exclusions
  • Add the number of days Facebook will keep people in this audience. No more than 180
  • Give it a name and click on Create Audience

create-custom-audience

Note: this tool lets you use combinations of Events and URLs

What Can You Do With Your Custom Audience

The most obvious thing you can do is to target it in your ads. It will be very good idea to target people that made a purchase worth more than $200, for example, because they probably are good consumers. Or you can target people that registered to your newsletter (you will need a Dynamic Event on the register button). You can target every person that performed a search on your website and you can tell Facebook what the search contained, let’s say every person that searched for blue shoes. The imagination is the limit here, really.

Another smart thing you should do is to exclude some audiences from your campaigns. Assume you have an ad for a product. What you want to do is to exclude from your targeted audience people that already bought that specific product. Doing so is very simple: create a Custom Audience from your Purchase  Event, select content_ids parameter and add the ID of your product. In your add settings simply exclude this audience. This is just a small example, but you should carefully plan what audiences to exclude because this is almost as important as what audiences you are targeting and can be crucial for the efficiency of your campaigns.

As you can see, the new Facebook Pixel is a small but powerful tool and can have many ways of being useful.

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8 Responses

  1. Great stuff!

    Quick question:

    If I have plenty of viewContent type of events in my website, how I can differentiate these when using Facebook reports?
    Are you guys facing this disadvantage as well? Custom column names only seem to work with custom conversions at the moment.

    Thanks!

    1. Well, the only thing coming to my mind is to ignore the ViewContent event. Just make your default custom report without it, so it will not bother you anymore. That’s the way I’m doing it. I also have a custom events report, with all the events, that I check from time to time. We have an article on how to create custom reports.
      You have the option to disable the event from the PixelYourSite plugin setup. I won’t recommend this, since it is useful to be able to check it when needed.
      This event can come in handy when creating Custom Audiences (Custom Combination). You can make some interesting stuff with it, like creating audiences from people visiting products in one category, or products with a price bigger that a value and then retarget those users with relevant ads.

  2. Hi,

    I did following like the steps above shown when create Custom Audience – under Website Traffic -> Custom Combination -> I selected Event BUT I can only see these 2 ‘ViewContent’ & ‘PageView’ in the Drop down list…

    How come I can’t see the ‘AddToCart’ & ‘Purchase’ in the drop down list?

    Appreciate your feedback.

    Thanks

    1. Sorry to reply so very late. You probably got your answer by now. The events must first be triggered on your website and only after that they will pop up in your FB admin. Once you trigger them yourself, give Facebook some time to update the data.

  3. I noticed that pixelyoursite has this GeneralEvent. I’m still trying to find d out how to use this as a retargeting.
    I received email, that setting the load time to 15-18s is a good idea to filter audience. I did set them. Yet I could now find a way to use the event.

    1. Create custom audiences based on the Purchase event and parameters like content_name, tag, category, or id, and exclude them when you configure your targeting.

  4. Hi,

    I want to see in my statistiques on Facebook which product people bought.

    The first thing I thought about is to create custom conversion in order to see it in my report.

    However, how can I do if I have more than 1K products ?

    My client is using your solution.

    Thanks in advance,

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