Increase Your Facebook Custom Audience Match Rate by 19%

Social Media provides marketers with unprecedented reach to connect with prospective customers. Estimates have consumers spending as high as five hours per day on mobile devices, with 1 in 5 minutes of that time spent on Social Media. Every second provides an opportunity to leave an impression on a consumer or drive a conversion.

Now that platforms such as Facebook, through their Custom Audience feature, have begun to do the heavy lifting for brands and agencies, it is easier than ever before to execute complex, comprehensive social media marketing campaigns.

It’s so easy, they say, that anyone can do it.

That’s just the problem, though. Anyone can. And everyone does.

Marketing through a social channel is no longer optional – it’s an integral part of any holistic marketing campaign.

Smart marketers like you know this, and more importantly, you are aware that one of the main hurdles towards using Custom Audiences effectively is match rates.

An advertisement or offer is only as good as the number of people who see it. Uploading 10,000 phone numbers only to yield a 50% match rate can be a frustrating (and expensive!) challenge.

Through tinkering and good old-fashioned trial-and-error, the collective intelligence of the Marketing world has discovered that Facebook’s Advanced Matching allows you to increase your match rates (19% on average) by including additional data points to better refine your audience. These data points include:

Email Address
Phone Number
First Name
Last Name
City
State
Country
Date of Birth
Gender

That’s great, you’re thinking, but who has all of that data?

For marketers looking to obtain more customer information to drive increased conversions through Facebook Custom Audiences, there are two main avenues:

1. Ask

Looking for more customer information? Ask for it. While this may seem like a comically simplistic approach, businesses are constantly amazed by what customers will share about themselves when customers truly believe that information is being used to personalize and improve their experience.

2. Enrich

Leverage partnerships with data companies to transform seemingly anonymous identifiers (such as a phone number) into rich customer profiles. This newly obtained information can then be leveraged to build out the type of Custom Audiences you dream of. The best part? Most firms can do this in a real-time or post-batch environment.

But, in the words of Reading Rainbow, don’t take my word for it! Compile some records with some of the above advice and run your own A/B test. Let us know your results in the comments!