Remove customers from custom audience in Facebook

There are use cases where one needs to quickly remove a customer from custom audience. For example - the customer visited some product and did not buy it. The customer was browsing for a while, so you added this customer to the custom audience and targeted him or her with ads.

Then, the customer converted - bought the product. And now you want him or her gone from custom audience, you want to exclude them.

There are multiple ways on how to achieve this, today we will explore a way where you, as a user, are in control of all aspects of exclusion. Because we will create an exclusion list. 

First, create a list of visitors you want to target, let's call it Visitors to target. As a simple example, I want all customers visiting certain category in last 21 days.

Next, let's create an exclusion list. A new segment we will call Visitors to exclude. It will contain all the people, who bought something in the same category as above in last 21 days. In the end, when we take the first segment and exclude from there all customers  from the second segment, what we are left with is: all customers who were in certain category in last 21 days, but did not buy anything from this category. 

And as you can see here - we want to exclude approximately 5 000 customers out of 20 000. Now that we have both segments ready, let's set up the integration with Facebook.

It is as easy as enabling Facebook destination and uploading respective audiences. Go ahead and do that. Once you run the first load, log in to the Facebook, note the Audience ID of the newly created audience and put it as a second parameter in destination parameters. By doing this, the destination will upload new customers always to the same audience, rather than creating a new one with each run.

As a last step, go to Facebook, select the adset you would like to serve and in targeting set: "Target all customers from Custom Audience called Visitors to target and at the same time exclude all customers in Custom Audience called Visitors to exclude".

By scheduling these two segments to export to Facebook every hour or two, you can be sure that once the customer buys a product from monitored category, you will exclude him automatically from the adset and he or she will not see the ad.

And as always, let us know in case of questions at help@meiro.io!