Facebook announces tools to let advertisers target people who visited their site or used their mobile app

Facebook today announced new custom audience features that let advertisers and market target users who have previously visited their website and or used their mobile app. The new tools will be available “soon” to a limited number of test partners and will roll out globally “in the coming months.”

For those who don’t know, Facebook’s custom audience feature, which launched last fall, lets marketers take their current customer lists and show ads to just those people on Facebook. This new addition means they can drill down and only serve ads to desktop or mobile users that have shown interested by actively accessing a given site or app.

Facebook offers the following example:

For instance, a bike retailer could reach people who started designing bikes on its website but didn’t make a purchase. Through custom audiences, the company can reach these people via desktop News Feed and encourage them to finish customizing online. Or, a mobile travel app can deliver ads to people who have downloaded their app but haven’t used it in a while and encourage them to book getaways within the app.

Custom audiences work with all of the Facebook’s ad formats and targeting capabilities, while mobile app custom audiences are similar but designed specifically for mobile app developers. In short, today’s move is yet another example of the company pulling the information on other properties where its plugins reside back to its main service, to the benefit of its revenue-generating partners.

Facebook admits website custom audiences is similar to existing remarketing tools for reaching people who previously interacted with their desktop websites, and many marketers already use third-party tools to remarket through Facebook Exchange (FBX). The company expects advertisers to use FBX differently than website and mobile app custom audiences; the former is for advertisers with a large number of products and audiences while the latter is for businesses that don’t typically work with third parties.

See also – Facebook redesigns its ad buying and reporting tools to help businesses meet ‘objectives’ and Facebook is tweaking its News Feed ads algorithm to consider user feedback, including what you report or hide

Top Image Credit: Manjunath Kiran/Getty Images