4 Ways to Benefit From Facebook Video Ads Audiences
Have you ever run an advertising campaign on Facebook where the results were not as good as expected?
Would you like to know how to target your ads based on the level of interest that different users might have towards your brand?
Successful advertising campaigns require spending some time adjusting different targeting elements, so ads are shown only to those users most likely to be interested in the advertising brand.
Unfortunately this is not an easy task, and many times what looks like an optimum audience doesn’t react as expected to the ads they see. Users have their own behaviors that dictate the way they respond to content; so even if they could be interested in your brand or products, they could still skip your ads for different reasons.
Being able to target users based on their level of engagement would be really a powerful strategy, as you could adapt the message and design of your ad to better suit the expected behavior of your target audience.
This can be done with the help of Facebook video ads and more specifically using two of its main features:
- Creation of two audiences of users who engaged with your video
- A Call-to-Action (CTA) button displayed at the end of the video, used to drive traffic to a landing page – as you can see on this image
Facebook Video Ads Audiences
When configuring an advertising campaign with video ads, Facebook allows creating two separate audiences based on user’s level of engagement with the content displayed:
- Users who have viewed at least 3 seconds of your video
- Users who have viewed at least 95% of your video
If this option is selected when configuring the advertising campaign, Facebook creates these two audiences automatically in the 24 hours after the end of the campaign. The only requirement is, the video used as a source of data must have received at least 1,000 views in a 24-hour period at any time during that campaign.
Combining these two audiences on Power Editor, where you have the option of excluding specific audiences from your targeting, provides new opportunities for your future advertising campaigns.
Let’s see some of them.
1. Medium Engaged Users – Incomplete Video Views
Users who started watching your video but didn’t make it to the end could be a good targeting audience for a new campaign. After all, they were initially attracted to your content.
When creating your new campaign, try understanding the reasons why they stopped watching your video. Was it too long? Was the message confusing? Your ad analytics include a good range of metrics to help you identify these reasons.
To target a new campaign to these users, do the following:
- Target: Audience of users who watched at least 3 seconds of your video
- Excluding Audience: Users who watched 95% of the video.
With this targeting combination, your new campaign won’t be displayed to users who didn’t watch those first three seconds, thus your budget will be focused only on users who have already shown some interest in your company.
Remember these users stopped watching your video, so quite probably using a video ad again won’t work. Try with a link instead, where the destination page is the one you used in your first campaign.
And of course, change the message of your ad to make it look different from the first one they saw.
2. Top Engaged Users – Landing Page Visitors
It is fair to assume that those users who watched the whole video and then clicked on your CTA button to find more information are highly interested in your message.
If you create a Website Custom Audience from the visitors on the landing page where users are taken after clicking on the CTA, you could obtain an additional audience of highly engaged users. The key for this technique is making sure that page is only accessible from your video campaign, so you know all visitors are coming from your original video ad.
You could run a new campaign knowing those users are highly interested in your company. Alternatively, you could target only those who visited your landing page bud didn’t convert to your campaign goal.
To reach only these users, combine your audiences in the following way:
- Target: Users who visited your landing page
- Excluding Audience: Users who have already converted to your goal
This targeting will show your ad to users who are very close to converting; they simply need a good reason to do it!
3. Highly Engaged Users – Complete Video Views
The second level of engagement comes from those users who watched the whole video, but didn’t click on the CTA button at the end of it.
Targeting these users could also provide a high value in a new campaign, since all they need is a little push to visit your landing page.
The way of targeting these users is as follows:
- Target: Users who watched 95% of the video.
- Excluding Audience: Web Custom Audience of users who visited your landing page
As it happened with the medium engaged users, the best way of engaging these users is with a link ad that will take them directly to a landing page.
4. Low Engaged Users – Not Watching The Video
A user that ignored your video doesn’t necessarily mean a lost lead. There could be some reasons why they didn’t click on the video: perhaps their internet connection was not fast enough, the thumbnail displayed was not interesting, or simply they couldn’t spend time watching a video.
And even if they started watching it, the first three seconds could be not interesting enough, as can be appreciated in the following chart.
You could try reengaging with these users by targeting a new campaign to only those who didn’t watch the first three seconds of your video.
These users should be reached with the following targeting combination:
- Target: Same targeting settings as the ones used in your first video campaign (assuming they were good enough)
- Excluding Audience: Users who watched 3 seconds of your video.
Remember you have already tried reaching those users, but couldn’t get their attention. Keep this in mind when creating your new ads:
Changing the design and message, or providing an incentive to increase your CTR, could be good ideas.
Have you already used Facebook Video ads? What other tactics do you use to target your advertising campaigns only to very specific users? Let me know in the comments below…
