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Improve Facebook Custom Audience Match Rate by 80% using first-party data

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We absolutely cannot deny the fact that Facebook is the stadium for marketers. With 2.85 billion active users globally, the target audience that we are looking for is surely going through memes & feeds now, like this!

Why does personalization matter?

Personalization helps convert more, and FB’s recent survey shows 85-90% of the respondents find personalization valuable when making purchases.

And we all agree email marketing is the best way to send personalized messages to engage customers.

For example, an e-commerce marketer wants to engage the audience based on sizes, based on spending potential, purchase history… Personalization is not only about showing the right products to the right audience but also engaging the right audience at the right time.

Replicating Email Marketing personalization in FB and (Google Ads – Experiment is going on) …

Like email, when you want to engage and run an ad campaign for the users waiting for XL t-shirt restock or a campaign with an exclusive offer on their wish lists or a campaign to push the users from added to the cart to purchase the product.

But, the Facebook custom audience match rate sucks,

At CustomerLabs, we wanted to engage our blog visitors who had been visiting our site since last November, we had around 16K+ users.

We created a custom audience segment of the URL blog visitors on Facebook audience manager with a 180-days retention policy. Facebook could match only 4700 users which is a 25% match rate and we cannot personalize engagement when the audience is so low.

Facebook match rate

If we had to segment the audience into industry verticals to showcase relevant case studies we’d end up with less than 1000 audience and eventually, ads don’t run.

Come on FB, you can do better.

Annonyed Facebook user

Why is the FB custom audience match rate is so low?

We decided to dig deeper and run some experiments… Obviously, we found that the iOS’14 update was one of the reasons why Facebook couldn’t match the audience but beyond the iOS update the GDPR / CCPA also started playing into effect. The time has changed, now Facebook isn’t a place to store your customer data, it’s just an advertising tool.

If you had a look into their recent data policy updates totally limit how the data is being collected and used for ads. For more details have a read through this document by Facebook.

The same scenario applies to Google as well with their latest announcement of completely phasing out of third-party cookies from chrome by the end of 2022.

The power of First-Party Data – 90% match rates delivered.

The good thing was, we had our first-party data collected from last November. We figured out a way with our 1PD Ops to pass this segment to Facebook.

We created the segment with our first-party data and waited for a few days (3-7) for the audience to build. 

And wham-bam!! That’s a 90% match rate out of the sample size of 16k+ visitors.

Facebook match rate

First-Party Data collection made easy with CustomerLabs 1PD Ops…

Customerlabs 1PD Ops helps you collect First-Party data without any help from developers… We all have access to First-party data but have had no need to collect it so far. With new regulatory changes over data collection and sharing, it’s high time we collect our own data now.

Anonymous visitors First-Party Data:

Whenever a user visits our website, we have an opportunity to collect the data and store it in our database. In fact, every business should collect and store anonymous visitor data along with their browsing history. This should help businesses to understand how to improve conversion rates, as well as website copy, etc.

Known user first-party data:

When the user submits a form, makes a purchase, or shares his details, he becomes a known user. We can unify the data together.

Segment the users based on Behavior / Traits

When you want to engage a group of people, we can segment them as a cohort and push it to Facebook.

CustomerLabs 1PD Ops lets you segment the data into various segments/ categories like blog visitors, Added to cart, High-Value users, Abandoned cart, Visited product twice, or various other custom segments based on the requirement.

After segmenting the blog visitor data, CustomerLabs 1PD Ops syncs the data with Facebook (similarly you can sync the same segmented data to any other ad platform like google).

These high match rates have increased our chances to reach our messages right in front of these people via personalized ads just like emails and bringing them into the desired funnel to finally onboarding them as customers.
You need first party data sig

The moral of the story? –

Collect First-Party data Now! Like now-now!

  1. You need first-party data because you need to improve the Facebook custom audience match rate.
  2. You need first-party data because we saw the dip in ad performance already because of the iOS’14 update.
  3. You need first-party data because in 15months Google will be phasing out third-party cookies.
  4. You need first-party data because it helps reduce your customer acquisition cost.
  5. You need first-party data because YOU OWN IT

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

The custom audience match rate is the number of customers that match the target audience in the database of either Meta or Google. In this context, we stick to Facebook's custom audience match rate - i.e., the number of matched users in the list per every 100 facebook audiences. When you create custom audience on Facebook, it helps Facebook to show relevant ads to the right people, increasing the reach and optimizing the spending on the ad.
With more accurate data from both the pixel and the conversions API, you can achieve more leverage on your match rates on Facebook for your custom intent audiences.
A custom audience is the data of the audience that you collect from your website/CRMs/other offline channels and submit to the ad platforms while the lookalike audience is something that the ad platforms, in this case, Facebook, tries to identify based on the similarities between the data of the users you provided and in their database. So, the winner of custom vs lookalike audiences would be lookalike audiences on facebook that are supplemented by custom audiences.
Sadly, Yes. They do. Facebook ads do not run beyond 28 days effectively. Therefore, the Facebook custom audiences expire at some or the other point. Whereas with CustomerLabs, when you collect the first party data, which is your data. The data stays for beyond 365 days, i.e., forever!

Marketing enthusiast who enjoys writing articles on a wide range of topics including Marketing, SaaS, Technology, Construction, Life lessons, Public Policy Nature, and Sustainability. Good at Public Policy analysis with a deeper understanding of societal issues and potential solutions. Also loves to volunteer & contribute to society in every possible way.

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