Video Custom Audiences

To create a video custom audience, you don’t have to do anything before you go live or upload recorded video. As long as you go live or upload video to your Facebook business page, Facebook automatically creates the audience for you. (This functionality doesn’t work with videos on your Facebook groups or your personal page.) The custom audience will include anyone who watches at least three seconds of any video on your Facebook business page.

From that automatically created custom audience, you’ll want to set up your desired options. You can refine the custom audience based on how long someone watched the video and which video someone watched.

For example, Amanda says you can choose an individual video or create an aggregate of all of your video viewers. If you’re launching something and need a large audience, you could group viewers all together. If you’re looking to create a specific follow-up sequence, you might select one video at a time.

To set up your options, open your Audience dashboard inside Facebook Ads Manager. Click Create a Custom Video Audience. Next, choose how long the person had to watch to go into that audience. It starts at 3 seconds, goes to 10 seconds, and then to 25%, 50%, 75%, and 95% of the video viewed. Then, select whether people who watched any video or a specific video see your ad.

Amanda compares a three-second viewer with someone who watched 95% of your video to illustrate the applications of custom audiences.

For instance, say you have a 15-minute video with excellent, actionable content that goes to a sales page that’s highly relevant to the same topic. If someone consumed 95% of the video, they’re highly engaged. So ask them to take the next step in your relationship. Send them to a lead magnet or retarget them with a sales page. You can take quicker action with someone who watched a longer portion of your video.

On the flipside, you want to run retargeting ads to your three-second viewers too, because they have a branding impression of you from when they saw your video in their timeline. However, instead of asking them to share their email or sending them to a sales page, nurture that relationship. One way to do that is to show them another relevant piece of video content, something that adds more value to whatever your brand is offering.

Amanda says you could also set up the retargeting like a game. For example, tell viewers they’ll see bonus content if they watch for 10 seconds and an even more valuable offer if they watch 50% of the video. (Facebook changes the predetermined increments from seconds to percentages after a certain timeframe.)

Next, I ask about targeting live viewers versus people who watch the replay. Amanda says Facebook pushes live video because of the natural engagement. And it’s a great way to reach a larger audience. However, in your custom audience for retargeting, the distinction between live and replay viewers doesn’t matter. Facebook groups the metrics (who watched live and who watched the replay) together.

For instance, you go live for 15 minutes and get 1,000 views. Afterwards, the news feed continues to serve your video to people who like your page and to the friends of people who have engaged with the post, and you get an extra 500 views in the next 24 hours. All 1,500 people go into the retargeting audience.

To illustrate how you can combine custom audiences for retargeting, Amanda shares some exciting examples. For instance, you can retarget a specific set of video viewers by combining custom audiences of people who watched different videos.