I live a simple life in which I’m excited by simple things. I sat down tonight to complete a process I started a few hours earlier of creating Website Custom Audiences and Saved Audiences when I spotted something new…
Do you see it? It’s the final item: “Engagement on Facebook.”
Discovering this provided a roller coaster of emotions. Seeing that was immediately exciting. Seeing this description, though, brought me back down to earth momentarily…
“Create a list of people who have engaged with your videos on Facebook.”
That sounds an awful lot like Video Views Custom Audiences. But then as I went further, the excitement returned.
As I type this, I haven’t found anyone else who has this yet. I certainly haven’t read an announcement about it. So my assumption is that what I’m seeing is either a very limited test or the very early stages of a rollout (if not an accidental code push).
Let’s take a closer look at what this currently is, how it’s different from Video Views Custom Audiences, how it impacts us as advertisers and what it could mean later…
[Tweet “What are Engagement on Facebook Custom Audiences, and will they help us do these amazing things??”]
1. What Engagement on Facebook Custom Audiences Are
Go to “Audiences” within either Ads Manager or Power Editor. If you’re like me, you now have four options, as shown above. Let’s look at it again…
Click that fourth option…
First of all, let’s be very clear: At this point, it would appear that you could create a Custom Audience for multiple engagement types on Facebook. That’s exciting!
Of course, right now, the only engagement types deal with video. Less exciting since we’ve done that before, but go ahead and click within the “Engagement” text box…
As you can see, the following options are presented:
- People who viewed at least 3 seconds of your video
- People who viewed at least 10 seconds of your video
- People who viewed at least 25% of your video
- People who viewed at least 50% of your video
- People who viewed at least 75% of your video
- People who viewed at least 95% of your video
You also need to provide the following:
- Duration (1 to 180 days since the engagement)
- Audience Name
- Description (optional)
The process is much like that of creating a Website Custom Audience. But it’s also a manual process for creating a Video Views Custom Audience.
So the question… What’s the difference?
2. How They Are Different From Video Views Custom Audiences
If you’re not familiar with Video Views Custom Audiences, allow me to get you up to speed…
For a while now, Facebook has allowed some advertisers to create Video Views Custom Audiences. One way to do this is by checking a box while creating a video ad indicating that you wanted Facebook to generate such an audience.
As you can see above, this would allow you to create two different audiences of people:
- People who viewed at least 3 seconds of your video
- People who viewed at least 95% of your video
You could then target those people in other ads. This is great for building campaign sequences and showing relevant ads!
Some advertisers have reported not having that check box. Some of these advertisers, though, were still getting these audiences generated automatically…
Still others, though, were reporting getting neither the checkbox nor the audiences generated. They were left out!
At first blush, these new Engagement on Facebook Custom Audiences that I’m seeing (in their current form) are very similar to Video Views Custom Audiences. But there are some very important differences…
1) Select Multiple Videos for One Audience
With the old Video Views Custom Audiences, you could create an individual audience of people who viewed a single video.
After selecting an engagement type while creating an Engagement on Facebook Custom Audience, you’ll be asked to “Choose videos.”
Notice that “videos” is plural. Click that link…
You can select one or as many of your videos as you want!
2) More Engagement Options
With the old Video Views Custom Audiences, there were only two options of audiences to create:
- People who viewed at least 3 seconds of your video
- People who viewed at least 95% of your video
As you saw earlier, the new audiences provide six different video engagement options.
3) Mix and Match Engagement
You can actually select multiple engagement types. At first this didn’t make sense to me. Why would you create a 95% view and 75% view audience for the same videos? The 95% view audience would contain the entire 75% audience anyway.
But then it occurred to me that your single audience could include a different engagement for different videos. Like this…
4) Select a Duration
It’s simple, but this may be my favorite thing about these audiences.
Durations are one of the features that make Website Custom Audiences so powerful — and more useful than Email Custom Audiences, for example. They allow you to target people who visited a specific page during the past day. It’s what makes something like an evergreen Facebook campaign possible.
So now, you’ll be able to target people who viewed 95% of your video during the past day. Or past 10 days. Or past 30 days. Whatever, all the way up to 180.
And since you can create those, you can also exclude these audiences. So you could create one ad set targeting those who viewed your video during the past four days; another during the past 5-8 days; another during the past 9-12 days.
The duration provides lots of options!
3. How This Impacts Advertisers
I’ve gotta be straight with you: I am not comfortable creating video. I don’t enjoy doing it. And live video isn’t any better.
But it’s clear that people love it. And Facebook keeps giving us reasons to create video (like the recent update to the news feed that gives live video priority).
I consider this a very forceful push from Facebook. While Video Views Custom Audiences were interesting before, they weren’t all that flexible. But now we have a whole lot more control over what we create and what we can target.
If you’ve been trying to ignore video like I have, you’re running out of chances. You are now losing opportunities.
4. Attempting to Predict the Future
While all of this is great and exciting, I get most excited when I begin speculating about what may be coming.
Am I looking too far into this? These are called “Engagement on Facebook” Custom Audiences. They aren’t called “Video Engagement” Custom Audiences. When creating them, we’re asked to “Choose the type of content you want to use to create your audience.” There is no mention of video here.
So many possibilities. What about…
- People who liked a post
- People who liked a post by content type
- People who commented on a post
- People who commented on a post by content type
- People who shared a post
- People who shared a post by content type
- People who liked my page within the past X days
These are things I’ve asked Facebook about before. They would be incredibly powerful and useful. I can’t help but think that they may actually become a reality.
Of course, this is only speculation. But you can’t help but dream with me, right?
Your Turn
Do you have Engagement on Facebook Custom Audiences? What do you think about them?
Let me know in the comments below!