It is no secret that the iOS14 updates have thrown a wrench into digital advertising strategies this year. In the past, retargeting based on website traffic had been very successful in driving conversions. However, now that a lot of people are opting out of data tracking, advertisers are not seeing the same success or audience sizes that they had been previously. Here at Parallel Path, we have found a way to circumvent this by using the data that Facebook collects through their own platform engagement to build an audience to retarget.
While both types of retargeting (website and engagement) take actions into account, Engagement Custom Audiences use actions taken on Facebook’s group of apps and services, whereas Custom Audiences from your website use actions taken on your website tracked by a pixel.
“Engagement” refers to actions people can take while on Facebook such as viewing videos, following a Facebook page or opening a form in a lead generation ad. Engagement Custom Audiences help you show your ads to people who’ve taken these actions and thus demonstrated key interest in your business.
Bonus tip – You can also use these custom Engagement audiences as a source for a Lookalike Audience so you can find people who are similar to those who’ve demonstrated interest by interacting with your Facebook content.
Here are the Engagement Custom Audience types available:
Parallel Path has been actively monitoring the social ecosystem ever since the release of iOS 14, and when we started to notice smaller retargeting audiences with lower performance, we knew we had to take action. This method of supplemental “social engagement” retargeting has been crucial to helping our clients achieve the same level of scale and success as prior to the iOS updates.