Facebook empowers businesses of all sizes to retarget their existing customers. Why? Retargeting allows you to stay top of mind, build deeper relationships and hopefully sell more products and services by sending marketing content and advertising specifically to people who are familiar with your business. Here, we walk you through the basics of creating a Facebook retargeting ad in this quick guide.

Getting Started

1. On the left-hand column of your Facebook News Feed page, click Ads Manager.

2. Next, click on Audiences in the left navigation bar.

3. Click on the green Create Audience button in the upper right-hand corner.

4. Now you can upload a custom audience data file by clicking on the Data File Custom Audience. Your custom audience data file should include email addresses, user IDs, phone numbers, etc. of your current customers. They’ll be matched with people on Facebook to create an audience. Files must be in .csv or .txt format.

5. Name your audience and provide a brief description. Before you upload your file, select the type of information that you want Facebook to cross-reference in your database. Though you can choose User ID, Phone Number and/or Mobile Advertiser ID, the most common information is an email address from your customer database.

6. Select your type option and click the Choose File button to locate your data file. Note: You cannot use a purchased list.

Once you click the Create Audience button, Facebook will cross-reference your database with active Facebook profile accounts and provide you with an active audience in your Facebook Ad Manager that you can now retarget.

7. Next, create any type of advertisement for your ‘new’ audience.

8. When creating your ad, choose the new segment you just created under the ‘create your audience’ section. You’re done! It’s as easy as that.

Using the power of retargeting on Facebook, you can leverage a smaller advertising budget to target a qualified audience. This can translate into more traffic to your website and more sales for your business.

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