Facebook’s “Next Best Thing” Helps Us Little Guys

The combination of the Facebook pixel and the Lookalike Audience tool is one of the most incredible marketing innovations since the Internet was invented. I don’t know of anything that has democratized business so much in my lifetime. Now, mom ’n’ pop organizations and even sole proprietors can spool their customer bases to rival that of Fortune 100 companies and then unleash Facebook’s machine learning process to hone that list into a mind-boggling resource.

Unfortunately, for many of my clients, even just installing a code into their website header is a big ask; and many new companies don’t have the few hundred customer names required to start a Lookalike Audience.

Thankfully, Facebook invented the next best thing within the past couple months. I’ve been experimenting with it on behalf of several clients, and it’s killer.

Within the Custom Audience menu—where you upload lists and/or connect to your website pixel traffic—advertisers can now create an audience of people who recently interacted with your Facebook content. You can even indicate specific interactions, though I don’t.

For auction companies who sell the same or related asset categories, this audience is extra valuable. It functions similarly as the pixel, except that you can’t create lookalikes from website traffic that originates from other digital and offline sources. Also, you can’t create an audience that got to a specific action on your website like a pixel can. This new audience allows you to get people who interacted with your advertising but didn’t go to your website. As of right now, that’s something the Facebook pixel can’t do.

In only a few weeks of testing, I’ve found it to help both click through rates and cost per click. For one auction company, we recently had two auctions within a month for the same seller with the same inventory. Our average click-through rate jumped from 3.1% to 4.7%—with one ad hitting 7.8%. Our average cost per click dropped from $.47 to $.34.

These gains don’t cost anything, either. Like all of the other audience tools, Facebook gives this one away for free to help your ads be more relevant.

If you sell an asset category where your buyers might be sellers, this tool allows fantastic cross-marketing opportunities. In my early testing, this new audience has been successful for consignment auctions. For one of my clients who works a lot in agricultural real estate and equipment, I used to achieve really good results serving ads to people who liked their company Facebook page. I’ve switched those ads over to this audience—since recent activity trumps a one-time thumbs up.

You can designate this interacting audience for up to 365 days in the past or as short as you’d like. For auctioneers, you can create timelines that capture traffic going back to specific auction campaigns.

So, here’s to us small business marketers getting even more access to Facebook’s users! Here’s to us capturing our advertising traffic in a new way. And here’s to the marketing and re-marketing potential now available at our fingertips.

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Stock photo purchased from iStockPhoto.com.

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