Facebook Custom Audiences were previously limited to one condition: In order to reach a customer with Facebook Custom Audiences, you had to have contacted them beforehand.
Thanks to the new Facebook update, companies can now also recruit customers who were not previously fans of the Facebook page. The new Facebook function “Offline store visitors” makes it possible to acquire customers without ever having collected their customer data in any way.
Advantages:
The major advantages of using this data are obvious. It is possible to advertise new products directly to old customers, just as you can now exclude them from the search for new customers. It is now much easier to acquire fans, because from now on anyone can advertise directly to existing customers.
Another big advantage is that you now get a very accurate picture of your customers when creating a lookalike audience.
Limitations:
First of all, this update is not available to all store owners. The minimum requirements are a minimum number of 10 stores and whitelisting by Facebook. This means that this function is unfortunately not available for many smaller businesses.
If you meet the conditions, you can easily find the new option in the Business Manager. When creating a new custom audience, the “Store-Visit” target groups are now suggested. You can now make a few settings here and in the ad editor.
This update offers high-quality target groups. It opens up new marketing channels that combine online and offline marketing… As long as whitelisting does not become a data protection problem for companies.
Data protection:
Facebook now uses the location service to find out which stores you visit, even if you don’t use the app. The data is then forwarded to the companies so that they can advertise to exactly the right customers. Facebook explains it like this:
“Custom Audiences from people who visit your store are based on data from people who have location services enabled for Facebook. People may be included if they have location settings enabled on their mobile device and our system has high confidence that they visited a store. For this reason, Custom Audiences from people who visit your store may appear lower than your actual store visits.”
