How to Use the New Facebook Page Engagement Custom Audiences

Facebook’s ad targeting options are getting better by the day. With the latest offering, you can target people based on their engagement with your Facebook page.

This is exciting news for businesses who want to reach more of their target audience because it means you can solely focus on those who already know about your business and who are engaging with what you’re putting out there.

So why is engagement so important?

Why Engagement is Important

Engagement is a key indicator that someone is interested in your business. They’ve taken the time to like, comment, or message you.

When you run a Facebook page, it’s not all about how big your audience is. In fact, it’s more about how engaged that audience is with your content. You’ll see some pages with thousands of fans but only a few likes per post, whereas others will have much smaller audiences but will have more engagement on their updates.

Before now, you could only target everyone who liked your Facebook page or split them up into segments based on their demographics and interests.

There were no dynamic targeting options, which meant you could be targeting people who like your page but never interact with it.

How to Create a Custom Audience Based on Facebook Page Engagement

To start targeting people who interact with your Facebook page, you need to create a page engagement custom audience.

Step 1: Go to your Ads Manager and click the Menu button in the top-left. Then go to All Tools at the bottom.

Step 2: In the Assets column, go to Audiences.

Step 3: Click Create Audience and then select Custom Audience from the drop-down menu.

Step 4: Select Engagement on Facebook option (it appears at the bottom of the list).

Step 5: Choose the Facebook Page you want to use to create the custom audience.

Step 6: Choose the targeting options you’d like to use (we’ll talk more about this further down).

Note: You can select an audience that has engaged with your Facebook page from anywhere between 1 day and 365 days, so you can get really specific if you only want to target those who interacted in the past week, or get larger and slightly vaguer if you want to target everyone who’s interacted in the past year.

The Different Types of Targeting You Can Do With Facebook Engagement

Now you know why targeting through engagement is important and how to do it, let’s dig into the different ways you can target those who have engaged with your Facebook page.

1. Everyone Who’s Engaged with Your Page

This is the broadest option, and allows you to target everyone who has engaged with the content you’ve published on your Facebook page – this includes previous ads you’ve run as well as people who have messaged your page and simply visited your page.

2. Anyone Who’s Visited Your Page

Again, this is a broader way of targeting your fans. It includes everyone who visited your page, even if they didn’t interact with any of your content.

3. Anyone Who’s Engaged with Any Post or Ad

Things start getting a little more targeted with this option. You can hone in on people who have engaged with a post or an ad you’ve posted on your Page, including people who have simply “reacted” to a post, shared it, commented on it, clicked a link, or swiped through a Carousel Ad you’ve run.

4. Anyone Who’s Clicked a Call-to-Action Button

We’re getting even more targeted here. With this option, you can just target the people who clicked on the call-to-action button on your page, like a “Contact Us” button, a “Sign Up” button, a “Download” button, or a “Shop Now” button.

This is a good segment to target because they are active in their actions and are actively looking to “do” something.

5. Anyone Who’s Sent a Message to Your Page

If you’re a small business and get a lot of private messages from potential customers, this options allows you to target just them. You can hone in on people who have actively reached out to you to target a more engaged portion of your fan base. This can be also useful if you are using Messanger ads and want to retarget those that were interested in your offer.

6. Anyone Who’s Saved Your Page or Any Post

Finally, you can create a Custom Audience out of people who have saved your page or saved any post that you’ve published on it.

How to Target Your Facebook Engagement Custom Audience Even Further

Though these options all focus in on one specific group of your fan base, whether it’s people who have actively taken action by clicking a button or by sharing your posts with their friends, you can take also use them as a starting point to target down even further.

Add Geographic Targeting

You can segment further by targeting people who have engaged with your posts that live in a certain geographic region or, alternatively, you can remove all countries from the targeting to reach the largest possible audience.

Create a Lookalike Audience

You might be thinking, “that’s all well and good, but I have a tiny Facebook fan base with even less interaction.”

With Facebook’s ability to create Lookalike Audiences you can find people similar to those who have taken specific actions on your Facebook page.

To do this, simply select the Custom Audience you want to create a Lookalike Audience for, click the Actions drop-down menu and then select Create Lookalike.

This new feature from Facebook Ads brings a whole new dimension to your Facebook Page. By selecting people who are actively involved in your business in some way – either because they’ve shared a post or commented on a post or engaged in another way – you’re reaching people who know who you are and who are already interested in what you have to offer.