Congratulations on making it to the final module of our social media course. We're going to take this last week and focus solely on two advanced audience techniques that you can use on social media platforms. First, we're going to talk about lookalike audiences and we're also going to talk about retargeting techniques. At its core, these are two custom approaches or custom audience approaches that you can use to further hone the precision of your digital advertisements. So the first thing that you'll want to think about is, what audiences do I have that I could leverage that might help me better target my advertisements? Do you have existing customer databases that you can leverage? If so, it might be as easy as downloading a list and uploading it to your ad manager to get started with these two techniques. A custom audience is essentially taking a database of people that we have as a business. So it could be our customers that we have that regularly visit our store and pay via credit card or it could be a list of people that have bought stuff at our electronic store or our e-store. It could be people that regularly visit our website. These are all audiences that we can use to further hone our advertising efforts. This data can be inverted in a number of different ways. We can find these audiences via Facebook pixel. All we need to do to be able to track the audiences that visit our website and then retarget them with advertisements on Facebook, is install a little bit of pixel tracking code on the key webpages that we want to track as an advertiser. So if I want to know everyone that visits my coffee shop's website and I want to be able to advertise to those people on Facebook after the fact, I can. Of course, you may have your own customer databases. It could be an e-mail list for an irregular e-mail newsletter that you send. It could be a list of people that regularly visit your store or a book club, or a manual list of customers just based on transaction data or sales data. Of course custom audiences can also be inferred via Google Analytics. Google Analytics also offers website tracking a lot like Facebook pixel and we can actually use Google Analytics to track groups of people and retarget them with that. Finally, we can purchase lists of people that are likely to be more relevant to us from data providers and we could use those data provider lists to actually reach customers. So what databases are common? Let's talk about some common use cases. The most common e-mail database that you may already have is an e-mail newsletter. Whether you're Bloomingdale's or you're just a local coffee shop, if you're regularly contacting consumers via e-mails, whether these are just weekly updates, or product launches, or just e-store coupons, this is a primary database that you can use. It's essentially a group of people that you can contact on social media using retargeting approaches. You can see here that there are hundreds and hundreds of companies that have my data and that can retarget me. If we go back to the Facebook lecture, you can actually remember that a lot of these actual companies did actually upload my data to Facebook to make that connection so that they could retarget me on the platform. There are a lot of different e-mail manager databases and if you're using any of these, you have a list of customers that you can export and easily migrate to Facebook custom audiences and Twitter custom audiences. It's really this simple. Let's say you use Mailchimp. Mailchimp has an easy to use interface that allows you to import and export contacts. You can simply download your e-mail database, that is a group of customers with their e-mail addresses and possibly phone numbers. The next step is simply going to the advertising platform that you'd like and uploading that data so that they can begin to try to match those customers to actual people that use their platform. If you've got an e-store or some other type of electronic database of customers, figure out how you can easily export them to make that connection. So here's a screenshot from the point of sale service Square. If you're not familiar with Square, Square gives a really nice checkout experience to consumers. It's usually an iPad with some type of phone reader or card reader attached to the device and it just allows customers to check out digitally. Square allows consumers to enter in their e-mail address and phone number, and if they do, they've become trapped in the Square customer directory. It's really easy to access your customer directory if you have an account with Square, it's a matter of logging in. It's really easy to export those contacts so that you can use them for retargeting purposes. It's really as easy as clicking the Export button in the customer directory. Once you have that e-mail list, it'll often come in an Excel format or a comma separated values format, which is essentially a one row per customer with the fields being separated by a tab. Once you have that data, it's really easy to import it to the Facebook ads manager, or using the Twitter ads manager, or any other type of display manager. So if you wanted to retarget people using their advertisements, you can find a DSP that will accept this data and do the matching. There are other types of e-mail lists that you might not even think of. If you have Google Analytics and you're tracking the people that visit your website, you can actually use these people as retargeting options. So you don't have to just retarget every one that's visited your website, you can actually do segmentation. In any way that you can segment Google data, you can also segment that to be an audience that you reach. So for instance, if I only want to reach people that are age 25-34, I can create that segment and then really in one click, create a custom audience. I can do the same thing for gender and even interests. So if someone's interested in coffee or someone's interested in extreme sports, so on and so forth. Of course, you can also build custom segments around specific behaviors on the website. So whether people visited a specific product page, whether people put something in the cart but didn't quite check out, whether people actually did something like bought a specific product, or spent above in a certain amount of money, if you're tracking that stuff in Google Analytics, you can actually use those as segments and then build your custom audiences in that way. I want you to think about it. If you have a group of people that you really feel like are passionate customers and you can define that with a Google Analytics segment, it really is easy to create that custom audience. It's matter of clicks at that point. So can you think and brainstorm on what are some of the possible segments in Google Analytics that might actually correlate to people that'll be really likely to respond to your advertising campaign? If you can make that connection, using custom audiences is a no-brainer. Of course, Google Analytics really only allows you to do digital advertising via the Google ads platform. So if you're only tracking via Google Analytics and you'd like to do retargeting, let's say on Facebook, you'll need to install that Facebook pixel as well. It's not that hard and whoever is your web developer or your web administrator should be able to help you in getting that installed and working correctly. One of the common confusions that I see in students when they're trying to learn about these advanced custom audience techniques, is the difference between remarketing and retargeting. It's really simple. In fact, all you really need to know is there are many ways in which you can remarket to an individual. Yes, you can serve an ad to someone who just bought your product or almost bought your product That's retargeting. That's usually reserved for specifically digital advertising when we think of retargeting. That's usually its only use case, but remarketing is broader. We can remarket to someone by sending them a piece of snail mail. We can remarket to someone by actually knocking on their door. Retargeting usually just means digital advertising. So, if someone's talking about digital remarketing, they're invariably talking about the same techniques that we're talking about today, but we prefer the term retargeting just because it's more common in the ad lingo.
