Yes, you can build an invisible list easily and ethically.
The tool you use to do this is Facebook’s website custom audience.
Facebook allows you to place a tracking pixel on your website, and it then marks a person who goes to your website. When this person returns to Facebook, he or she is added to your audience.
You can track all traffic that goes to your website, traffic that goes to a certain page, traffic that goes to one page and not another, people who haven’t been to your page in a certain time frame, and many more options.
After you’ve created these audiences, Facebook will add people who go to the website pages and add them to your audience, then you can target this audience with ads.
You can’t get their individual names, but you can get them as a group.
Currently there must be at least twenty people in the audience before you can use it for targeting. If there are fewer, Facebook won’t let you target the audience.
What can you do with this information?
Depending on what you sell and how fast people buy after they come to your website, you’re building an audience of active leads.
People who are browsing websites about a topic or looking for products and services you sell are looking to buy.
You have the chance to set up ads and talk to the target audience.
A Facebook ad doesn’t have to sell an item.
Rather, it can be a way of introducing yourself to people. You can consider showing them a video that tells them about yourself and your business.
What are you telling them?
- An introduction to you and your business.
- Why you started your business
- What you do
- Why you’re different from everyone else
- How you do what you do to achieve better results both faster and cheaper
These are some ideas—you can expand on them as you see fit.
You can also offer these people the items they were looking for at a discounted price.
If you had an audience set up for people who went to one page and not another, you can target the people who looked at an item but didn’t go to the checkout page.
Let’s say you’re selling shoes. A person might view a specific pair of boots, but they don’t go to the checkout page.
You are then able to show them the boots again and point out their special features. This reminds the client of your offer.
The other way you could engage this audience is if at the end of a season when you want to have a clearance sale. You can target all the people who went to your sales page, and you can offer them the end-of-the-year clearance pricing.
You can help build a website custom audience with your own Facebook ads. When you’re promoting something and sending people to a page, you can have a tracking code on that page. As you send more people, you’re offering them your product and building an audience for future use at the same time.
This is a powerful concept.
None of this is hard to set up.
Once you have it set up, you’re building a list you can use without having to do any work with it or without having to ask people to opt in.
We’ve had success using this tool to motivate people to return to our pages and buy products. We know that they’re interested, and we can offer them the same or similar items.
There are a few limitations with these audiences.
First, you don’t start building them until you set them up. Facebook offers the option to add past traffic, but it doesn’t work very well.
Second, you can only keep people in these audiences for a limited time. You can choose the time, to a maximum of 180 days.
When people come back to the webpage, the timer is reset, and you have another 180 days.
When you get people to come to your website, you have them in your audience for 180 days. If they go away and don’t come back for 175 days, the timer is reset and they are in your audience for another 180 days.
This tool is a powerful addition to your marketing tool kit, and it can be used on any web page you control. You can send traffic the web page from any source and build an audience on Facebook.
It is inexpensive to use and will improve your results.
Go Social Experts offers tools that can show you how to use this feature, as well as the option of managing this tool for you.
Contact Brian at bhahn@gosocialexperts.com for more information.