Facebook now lets brands and businesses target ads based on how much time or even money you’ve spent on their sites, apps.
Facebook has introduced new options to its Website Custom Audiences targeting to let brands work out the most valuable members of audiences.
Therefore, Ads on Facebook are about to become even more reflective of what actions you took on a brand’s website or app.
Maz Sharafi, director of monetisation product marketing at Facebook, said “One of the challenges that marketers have is they’re seeing a lot of traffic to their websites and apps, but not all people are the same who come to their websites and apps,”
Instead of just advertising to people who visited a site or specific page on a site, brands can pinpoint the visitors who did something on the site a certain number of times. This help them make sure they are not wasting advertising money on window shoppers, but instead, focus on the people who are more serious about buying something, like the ones who keep returning to check out a specific phone model or review the pricing options.
“If someone were to visit the site five times in a given day or spend five whole minutes on a particular page, that’s a very different and stronger intent signal than someone who hits their website and just bounces off really quickly,” Sharafi said.
Considering this type of ad targeting can freak out people who don’t expect their browsing of a brand’s website to follow them back to Facebook — and especially how much they spend on a site reflected in their Facebook feed — here is a quick rundown of how this type of targeting works.
Each business or brand get a piece of code called a tracking pixel from Facebook, which they insert onto their own website or app. That pixel then keeps track of everyone that visits and a brand can direct the pixel to log certain information like which pages the people visited, how long they were on those pages and even how much money they spend when purchasing something from the site. A brand isn’t able to see exactly who this information corresponds to, but Facebook can match the logs against Facebook user’s profiles through a process called “hashing” which then aggregates and anonymizes the audience lists. Through this matching, a brand can now tell Facebook, “show this specific ad to people who spent more than five minutes checking out my page about the latest Android phones.”
In addition to this, brands can create sub-segments of their audiences. These can be based on how much time people spent doing a particular action on the site, like configuring a car; showing interest in a specific date range, like someone looking to travel at Christmas; even which device they used when visiting, were they on a desktop computer or an Android device. All of which is great information to help a brand construct a powerful targeted advertising campaign.
According to Sharafi, The New York Times used a form of the new ad targeting options to attract more subscribers to its publication. As a result of which, the amount of money the newspaper pays to attempt to turn somebody into a subscriber was reduced by 25 percent, and it also got 2.3 times more people to subscribe.
