Introducing Facebook’s New Intent-Driven Audiences

It unfortunately has been a while since I last blogged. Work has been keeping me extremely busy. However, I was so excited when I heard about this new Facebook advertising feature that I had to jump on and share!

Facebook recently announced a new potential Custom Audience targeting feature with their business partner, Kenshoo. Now hold on to your seats, because this one may be an exciting game changer for digital media buyers.

As part of Facebook’s new advertising feature developed with Kenshoo, advertisers will be able to match clicks on search ads to audiences on Facebook. The new Custom Audience will be known as an Intent-Driven Audience.

“We’re very excited about Intent-Driven Audiences and the ability to leverage signals from search marketing to reach our advertisers’ most valuable customers with Facebook advertising,” said Steve Katelman, EVP of Global Strategic Partnerships at Omnicom Media Group.

Very exciting indeed! But you may be wondering, how does it work?

Here’s the 411: If a user clicks on a Kenshoo search ad on Google, Bing, or Yahoo, a cookie is triggered by code placed on the advertiser’s site. The cookie then allows the advertiser to track the user, match their Facebook ID number, and re-target them while they’re visiting the popular social platform.

As with all Custom Audiences, advertisers will be able to create Lookalike Audiences from their specific Intent-Driven Audience segments to help increase their reach and pool of potential consumers. In addition, Facebook’s demographic and interest level targeting can be applied to refine the audience and meet your marketing needs/goals.

“Facebook’s Custom Audience targeting capabilities allow marketers to reach the people that matter most to them – their loyal customers. Kenshoo’s Intent-Driven Audiences allows advertisers to bridge audiences across marketing channels by bringing together consumer intent signals from search campaigns and Facebook’s Custom Audience targeting capabilities to drive better results for their marketing efforts,” said Blake Chandlee, VP of Partnerships, Facebook.

The new targeting feature is currently in beta testing and it is unknown as to when it will become widely available. However, Facebook slightly hinted that the technology is not exclusive to Kenshoo and other ad partners may build out their own versions.

One thing is for certain, in the end Facebook’s new targeting feature will help brands increase leads and potentially improve ROI.