How to create
powerful Custom
Audiences with PixelYourSite
Targeting people that already know about your products is always a good strategy to follow. Facebook
gives you a few ways to do it, and some of them can be really powerful.
With the help of the
“General Event” option from PixelYourSite you will be able to segment your audience
in very smart ways, opening the gates to some powerful marketing techniques.
Not just smart retargeting, efficient scaling too
The “General Event” won’t be useful just for your retargeting strategies. Using “Lookalike Audience” you
can scale your campaigns to reach new users similar to your existing ones.
From this guide you will learn:
● how to configure the Facebook Pixel code on your website to achieve fantastic
results and how to do it without messing arround with any code
● how to create super powerful
Custom Audiences
using
Custom Combinations
● how to scale your campaigns with
Lookalike Audience
● WooCommerce tips included
How to create
powerful Custom Audiences
with
PixelYourSite
How to Configure the
General Event
from
PixelYourSite
When you open PixelYourSite menu, on the first tab you will find the settings for the General Event.
Activate the event and give it a name you can easily remember. Save the settings, down on the tab.
Under the event name you will see a list of options. By default the event will be active on:
● Post
● Pages
● Taxonomy
The General Event won’t be active by default (you can activate it if you want too) on custom post types.
Important: For WooCommerce we have special options that you can activate from the dedicated tab. This
event won’t be present on WooCommerce Single Products pages, because there is a dedicated ViewContent
event on them, that you can control from the WooCommerce tab.
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How to Name the General Event
By default it is named GeneralEvent, but you have total liberty in naming this event. You can use the
Standard Facebook event name, ViewContent or you can come up with your own name.
If you use your own name Facebook will treat it like a Custom Event. Custom Events can be used when
creating Custom Audiences.
What you can’t do with a custom event is to optimize an ad for it. But you wouldn’t want to do this anyway
with an event that is present on most of your pages. Your ads should be optimized for something much more
specific, like the Purchase event or a Lead event, for example.
Pixel Helper Error:
When you’ll test the Genera Event with Pixel Helper Chrome extension you will see
an error message: “Facebook Pixel missing product information”. You can ignore this message, because it
is related to Facebook Dynamic Product Ads and this event is not used for it. If you’re running
WooCommerce and want to do Facebook Dynamic Ads, then the special ViewContent event on Product
pages will be used (it has all the required parameters)
How to create Custom Audiences based on pixel
events
What is a Pixel Event: an event is a piece of code added within the pixel, that sends key information to
Facebook when a page is visited by an user on when an action is performed on your website.
Using Events You can create Custom Audiences from people who visited relevant pages on your
website or did something important, like buying a product, adding a product to cart, subscribing to your
newsletter or clicking on a specific link.
Example: You can create an audience from people that visited articles in one category. Then you can
target them with an ad that mentions their interest in that particular category, showing a related product, or
offering a free ebook in exchange for their email.
Or, you can create an audience from people that viewed products in one or more categories and target
them accordingly. You can also segment the audience by the products that they bought, or by the total
value of their purchase. More details on how exactly do this latter on. Keep reading!
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How to create
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Custom Combination the secret tool that PRO
marketers are using
Facebook gives you a number of options to create a Custom Audience. All of them are really useful and
we recommend you to integrate at least some in your strategies.
But, among these options there is one in particular that can be of great help. It is hidden away and
overlooked by beginner marketers, but for those of us who make use of it, there is ample reward. I am
referring here to
Custom Combination , a feature that gives you great possibilities when it comes to
segmenting your audience.
Using Custom Combination Step by Step Guide
Open Audiences from your Ads Manager or Business Manager. Here it is how it looks like in Business
Manager:
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Then go on
Create Audience
and select
Custom Audience
:
You will see a popup window with three different options. Select the one in the middle, Website Traffic .
Then click on the dropdown in the middle of the new window and select the last option,
Custom
Combination:
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Now you will have a lot of visible and (still) hidden goodies. Under “Traffic that meets the following:” you
have another dropdown. The default value is “URL Contains”. Change it to Event :
You are ready to create your Custom Audiences based on Events. Click in the “Choose an event” field. A
list with all available events will open. Select the one you need.
Click on the “Add a parameter” field. You will see a list with all the available parameters for this event.
Select one and add your condition. You can repeat the process until you are happy for the results.
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How to create
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Example:
Let’s say you want to create a Custom Audience from people who visited Articles under Health category
in the last 10 days, at least 5 times. This is what you need to do:
● Select GeneralEvent
● Select content_type and add Post as condition (this will tell FB to add in the audience people
who visited Posts on your website)
● Select content_category and add Health as condition (this will tell FB to limit the audience only
to people who visited Posts under a category that contains the world “Health”
● Select At least (you can also select At most ) add 5, then add the number of of days, 10. This
will tell FB to limit the audience only to visitors that visited Posts under a category that contains
Health for at least 5 times in the last 10 days.
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Facebook gives you a lot of options, and it is impossible for us to cover all of them here. Here are just a
few of the conditions you can use:
For Parameters:
● Contains
● Doesn’t contain
● Is
● Sum is
● Average is
● Maximum is
● Minimum is
Include more define another set of rules in the same way as before
Exclude People define a set of rules that will exclude people (for example you can exclude buyers
that activated the purchase event in the last 5 days)
URL contains or URL equals you can also use conditions based on the URLs visited on your
website.
Define traffic type:
● All both desktop and mobile
● Mobile you can select mobile devices
● Desktop only
Important: if the event you want to use is new, Facebook might not show it just yet. It is better to
activate the event yourself by opening the page where it is active. Then give FB some time to update
the data in its system.
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WooCommerce Strategies
If you are a WooCommerce users we suggest to based most of your Facebook retargeting strategies on the
WooCommerce default events:
● ViewContent on Product Pages
● AddToCart on Cart page and dynamic event on add to cart button click
● InitiateCheckout on Checkout Page
● Purchase on Thank You Page
The general event is not present on WooCommerce Products. For Custom Audiences and Dynamic
Ads , there is a special ViewContent event.
Remember, the General Event will still work on the rest of WooCommerce pages, including on Product
Categories .
Want to create a Custom Audience from WooCommerce Categories? Use the General Event
If you need, you can create Custom Audiences for specific product categories with the help of the General
Event.
In order to achieve this, you must select the General Event name, select content_type: product cat (that’s the
custom name for WooCommerce categories) and define the content_name according to your needs.
Purchase Event
This is one event that you MUST not ignore. I recommend to use it in more than one ways.
First of all, optimize your campaigns for it. This will tell Facebook to send you traffic that is more likely to
convert. That means more buyers.
Then create a few Custom Audiences based on the Purchase Event. You can create something like this:
● Purchase event in the last 10 days
● Purchase event in the last 30 days
● Purchase event in the last 180 days
Sometimes you will want to exclude the Purchase 10 days audience from your targeting. Those are people
who just bought your products. Some of them are still waiting for their delivery and they are not likely to buy
again. You probably have their emails, so you can send them upsells without spending on ads.
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Sometimes you will want to do just the opposite:
heavily target recent buyers with an upsell offer.
Important: For the Purchase Event to work, you must redirect the users back to the Thank You page of
your website after the payment is processed. Usually you can set this up from your payment company
settings.
Create Lookalike Audiences based on the Purchase Event
This is one of the most profitable strategies that I can recommend you. Use this fantastic Facebook option to
scale your campaigns. It will prove to be very profitable.
Read on, and you will find more tips on Lookalike Audiences down on this guide.
Create Lookalike Audiences based on the Purchase Event and key products
When you have a few star products in your inventory it will be foolish to ignore them. Create a Purchase
Event Custom Audience where you select a particular successful product. Use content_name or id to limit the
audience just to people that bought it.
Then, create a Lookalike Audience and target it with your ads.
Be creative
There is an unlimited range of strategies you can use. Try to experiment with various Audiences.
You can create an audience from clients that bought products for at least $100, or a minimum of 3 products
in the last 3 months.
You can make smart and complex combinations. If you have articles on your site you can create an audience
of people who visited specific articles (using the General Event as described before) and also visited
products from your website (using the ViewContent Event) but never bought something in the last month
(excluding Purchase Event in the last 30 days).
Those are just a theoretically examples, to prove that you have a lot of room to play with these features.
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How to Configure PixelYourSite WooCommerce Options
We recommend you to leave all the PRO options ON, because they are really powerful and they will help you
to increase your ads profitability.
If you don’t have the PRO version yet,
here is a link from where you can upgrade now for a big
discount
Take a close look on your Value options . All the events can have a value defined. For the Purchase event
this will be the value of the transaction. You can decide if this value will include taxes or shipping. There are
other options as well.
You can also define Value conditions for each event.
Enable Additional Parameters they will automatically pull key data like Product Name, Product Category
or the number of products that were bought.
Keep them ON, because they will prove a real gem when you’ll create Custom Audiences. It is better to
start sending this data to Facebook from the very beginning, despite the fact that you don’t have a
strategy that includes it just yet.
Why? Facebook has an option to create Custom Audiences by using past data, so when you decide upon
some criteria, you will be able to start immediately, without having to wait for the information to be gather. All
you are going to need will already be in Facebook big computers for you to use.
Facebook Dynamic Product Ads
Don’t ignore this
What is Facebook Dynamic Product Ads? It is a Retargeting platform that Facebook offers to its clients. It
is incredibly efficient and has a lot of useful features.
Basically, once a visitors lands on a product page, or adds a product to the cart it will see specific ads for that
product or for a group of products closely related. If the product is bought, ads for it will automatically stop.
There is also an option to have strictly Cart Recovery campaigns. In this case you will target only people that
added products to the cart but never bought them. This is a must do for any shop owner. It will work on
autopilot and help you finalize lost sales.
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What you need for Facebook Dynamic Product Ads?
1.
Pixel Setup The Facebook pixel will send data to Facebook, telling what products a user visited, added
to cart or bought on your site.
PixelYourSite plugin adds all the necessary data and comes with Dynamic
Products Ads out of the box integration.
2.
Product Catalog this is a feed with your products and specific information about them, that you are going
to upload to Facebook.
We have a dedicated plugin that creates accurate XML feeds for WooCommerce that are 100%
compatible with Facebook Dynamic Product Ads. To Download it Now for a Big Discount Click Here
3.
Create a Dynamic Template Create a dynamic ad template that is automatically filled with the right
products. You can choose to show all products or only a single product set which you define. Use keywords
to pull in images, product names, prices, and more dynamically from your product catalog.
This is an intuitive process that you can do from the Power Editor. We have a video on the site showing
how to do this:
click here for the video
How to find what data to target
First step is to figure it out what type of content you want your future audience to visit on your website. Then,
open that content in your Chrome Browser. Make sure you have Pixel Helper Chrome Extension installed.
You want to target people that visited articles from one particular category? Then open an article that belongs
to it.
Want to target visitors of products within one category? Open one.
Maybe you are using custom post type on your website and you want to have Custom Audiences based on
them. Open one as well.
Want to target visitors of a particular page? Open it in Chrome.
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What to look for
In the top right corner of your browser you will see the Pixel Helper icon.
Click on it, go to your general event (it will have the name you gave it in your PixelYourSite settings), then
click on “view log”. Now you can see what data Facebook has for that event.
Make a note for the values under content_type content_category
, content_name
and .
Note:
You will see an error reported for the general event, saying: “No products found for given content IDs”.
You can safely ignore it. It is related to Facebook Dynamic Product Ads, but
this particular event will not be
used for that.
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Recommended strategies
When it comes to marketing, knowing your customers or your potential customers is vital. More so, Facebook
marketing has its own particularities, and entering in a virtual dialog with your audience is a proven strategy.
Imagine knowing for sure that the people seeing one of your ads know your website and have a genuine
interest in your content. But not in any content that you might have, in something very particular, in articles
from one particular category, or in the stuff you have only one a distinct page. This knowledge is powerful,
because you can create highly targeted marketing strategy.
Analyze your existing traffic
Spend time on Google Analytics to better understand your visitors and your customers. Once you reach the
first conclusions, create a few Custom Audiences based on them. Use events for better segmenting.
Test your Custom Audiences
Once you have a few Custom Audiences with sufficient volume, target them with ads. If the audience is big
enough you will start to understand what’s working and what’s not in a few days. Do the obvious, serve more
ads against the working audiences and stop the less effecting ones.
Create more Custom Audiences based on the traffic you are getting from Facebook. If you are promoting an
ebook, create a custom audience from people that downloaded the ebook (you can do this with Dynamic
Events). Then retarget them with an offer. Make this campaign to work in conjunction with your emails (If you
are using any).
IMPORTANT: If you are running an ecommerce site,
always create an audience based on the Purchase
event. This event must be triggered on the Thank You page of your site. PixelYourSite plugin automatically
adds the Purchase event for WooCommerce.
Create Lookalike Audiences
This is one of the most efficient ways to grow your client base. Facebook gives you a tool to create a similar
audience based on existing once. In my experience, this strategy is highly efficient.
The most important Lookalike Audience you must create is the one based on your existing customers. So
you will have to create at least one Lookalike Audience based on the Purchase event (assuming that this is
the event triggered by someone who buys from your site)
Creating Lookalike Audiences from audiences based on important categories is also a good idea (Products
or Posts from one or more categories).
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It is likely that you will need to create more than just one Lookalike Audience. Since they are strictly country
based, if your market is international you will have to create a separate audience for each important country.
If the country your are targeting has a small to medium population, it is recommended not to limit yourself to a
1% audience, but to try broader ones as well. I sometimes find 3% or even 5% lookalike to be very profitable
when scaling a campaign.
NOTE: A Lookalike Audience is based on an existing Custom Audience and it is created automatically by
Facebook. It will consist of people that are similar to the ones in your existing audience. The exact criteria
Facebook uses for this process are not public, but they prove to be highly accurate in most cases .
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When you create a Lookalike Audience you will have to decide on 3 things:
1. Source: a Custom Audience, a conversion tracking pixel (soon to be out of use, you better ignore
this), a Facebook Page
2. Country: if you want to target more than one country you will have to create a separate audience for
each of them
3. Size: audience size ranges from 1% to 10% of the total population in the country you choose, with 1%
being those who most closely match your source.
Make use of Dynamic Events
What are Events? If you have read up to this point, I am pretty sure that you already know what events are.
They are pieces of code (part of the pixel code) that send specific information (parameters) to Facebook
when something important happens on your website, like when a key page is visited.
What are Dynamic Events? Unlike normal events, the dynamic events won’t be triggered on page load, but
when the user does something significant on your site. This can be a click on an internal or external links
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(affiliate links, for example) or a click on a button, like an Add To Cart button, a Contact Form button, or a
Newsletter Signup button.
Example: the AddToCart event triggered on WooCommerce add to cart button click is a dynamic event (and
a standard feature of PixelYourSite plugin)
What can you do with Dynamic Events?
As you suspect, a lot of things. Almost Everything, I suppose is the right answer. The short one will be
something like this:
● Optimize your ads if you create a standard dynamic event you will be able to optimize the ads for it
by selecting “Increase conversion on your website” as campaign objective and the event as Website
Conversion
● Create Custom Audiences you can and you should follow the process described in this guide to
create custom audiences based on the dynamic events from your website.
● Create Lookalike Audiences once you have a Custom Audience, create Lookalike audiences to
expand your ads reach and gain more customers.
How to add Dynamic Events to your site
With PixelYourSite Pro you can create any number of Dynamic Events by targeting URLs in links or CSS
elements from your site.
We have a complete guide that teach you how to do this step by step. It is linked from within the plugin itself,
so you won’t miss it.
Now you are familiar with the General Event option from PixelYourSite and you know how to create super
targeted Custom Audiences. Integrate Dynamic Events in your strategies, because they do give results.
If you’re running a WooCommerce site, seriously consider doing some Dynamic Ads campaigns. Enable
Value for the WooCommerce events so you can better track your ads performance.
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Key Facts from this Guide
● Enable the General Event option from PixelYourSite plugin it will help you create powerful
audiences to target with your ads
● Enable WooCommerce Options If you are using WooCommerce, base most of your Custom
Audiences on the Purchase event and on the ViewContent event. Keep the Pro options ON
● Create Custom Audiences
they are highly efficient and will let you scale your campaigns with
great success
● Integrate Dynamic Events in your strategy Optimizing for specific actions can be highly
profitable. You can create campaigns that are optimize for clicks on affiliate links, or for newsletter
signups. Create custom and lookalike audiences from the dynamic events as well
Update to
PixelYourSite Pro
to benefit from all its features and increase your campaign's profitability.
Click here to download for a big discount
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