Remove customers from the custom audience on Facebook

There are use cases where one needs to quickly remove a customer from the 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 the 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 a certain category in the 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 the 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 a 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 Facebook, note the Audience ID of the newly created audience and put it as the 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 the 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 the 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!