Engagement as a performance metric has always been tied to Facebook advertising, but with the roll out of Page Engagement Custom Audiences, its impact on the consumer journey is more tangible than ever. While counting up reactions, comments, shares, and other interactions is useful in assessing overall brand awareness and favorability, marketers can now leverage that engagement to more directly help with additional business objectives.
What’s New
An Engagement Custom Audience is a specific set of people who have engaged with your content on Facebook. Until recently, Engagement Custom Audiences were restricted to those who interacted with videos, lead ads, or canvases. Although this product is being released gradually, some advertisers can now create audiences based on the following types of page engagement:
- Everyone who engaged with your Page
- Anyone who visited your Page
- People who engaged with any post or ad
- People who clicked any call-to-action button
- People who sent a message to your Page
- People who saved your Page or any post
Why It Matters
By expanding audience creation options, Facebook has better equipped advertisers to execute a full-funnel marketing strategy. Filtering audiences using past engagement activity (which currently can be set as recent as 1 day or as long ago as 365 days) enables brands to create content that will resonate with consumers on a more personal level. Moreover, this development uses data to better connect the dots between Facebook campaigns optimized for different marketing objectives.
The ability to target based on Page engagement will benefit brands that promote a cycle of diverse content in their effort to capture attention, elicit engagement, drive traffic, and ultimately incentivize conversion. By strategically leveraging Page Engagement Custom Audiences, brands won’t have to cast as wide a net when prospecting mid- and bottom-funnel consumers. Targeting users who have engaged with other content means the ads they see will be more relevant and won’t seem so unprovoked.
The screenshots below highlight how engagement data can help brands create more relevant content to drive site traffic and conversion:
What Might Be Next
The roll out of these Page Engagement Custom Audiences could open the door to even more exciting targeting capabilities for advertisers. It won’t come as a huge surprise if Facebook eventually allows us to create audiences based on engagement with a particular post or ad (like it does with videos, lead ads, and canvases). Imagine delivering the wash and wax offer only to users who engaged with the “Ride of the Month” post. Talk about relevancy!
Armed with the new targeting options, Facebook advertisers will be better suited to create touch points that build trust and funnel engaged audiences toward conversion — audiences that want to see their content. We can all get behind that.