About Audience Builder
Our marketer-centric Audience Builder tool allows you to create seed audiences from your first-party referral data, synchronise them with Meta and target more people like them on Meta via lookalike audiences.
Before you begin
Audience Builder is available for clients as an add-on. Reach out to your Mention Me Account Manager to learn more and upgrade if needed.
Prerequisites
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You would need to have at least Advertiser or Admin permission for your Meta Ads account with Full Control permission. You can check this by doing the following:
- Login to your Meta Business Manager account settings
- Go to Users > People on the left menu, select your user account
- Select the ad account you want to create audiences in
- If you cannot see the ad account, you may need an administrator to add you
- Then make sure “Manage ad account” is enabled
- If it's not already turned on, switch it on
- If the switch is disabled you may need an administrator to do it for you
- You will need access to the Mention Me platform (If you do not have access, reach out to your Mention Me CSM who can sort it out for you).
How to get started
Once your account has been activated for Audience Builder, you can build and synchronise your audience immediately.
Step 1 - Connect your Ads Account
On the Mention Me platform, Click Connect to begin the connection process
- Agree to the Terms and Conditions to allow Mention Me to transfer data to Meta on your behalf
- Create a new authentication
- Name your authentication and select Create
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Log in with your personal Meta details
- Grant Mention Me permission to access your Meta account (Note: Mention Me won’t be able to post anything to your page)
- Select which Meta Ad Account you want to send your Mention Me data to
Step 2 - Build your audience
As you have now connected Mention Me to your Meta Account, you can now start building your audience.
- Select the country(s) you want to build the audience from
Top Tip: We recommend you select one country to create a seed audience for targeting on Meta. However, if your contact numbers are low you can select multiple countries in similar markets to create a more effective seed audience.
- Select the dataset you want to use to build your audience on and click Next
Top Tip: You will be able to see the estimated number of contacts for each dataset. We recommend to use Existing customers who have successfully referred a friend. If you have less than 1,000 contacts available the we recommend choosing the next dataset in the list .
Audience data is collected from your best customers over the last 12 months and it includes:
| Audience data set | Description |
|---|---|
| Highest value successful referrers (ECR) |
Advocates with the greatest revenue when accounting for both their spend and their friend's spend. Learn more about ECR |
|
Active referrers (ECR) |
Advocates who have either referred or purchased recently. Learn more about ECR |
|
Existing customers who successfully referred a friend |
Our recommended data set as these are your biggest brand advocates. |
|
Existing customers who have shared |
Your big advocates who are highly engaged with your brand. |
|
Existing customers who have joined the referral programme |
Customers that are on the path to becoming your newest advocates of your brand. |
|
Referred customers who have placed their first orders |
New customers gained from your advocates, becoming advocates in the future. |
Step 3 - Name your Audience
Name your Audience and click Next
- A default name will be created for you. The audience name you define here will show in your Meta Ads Manager.
- The countries selected when creating your audience will also appear in the description of your audience in Meta Ads Manager
- If you want to change the name, we recommend a naming convention that you will remember and be able to easily identify.
Step 4 - Confirm Consent and Review your Audience
Confirm that you have the relevant consents required either by law or the relevant paid social channel to enable Mention Me to process this data
Review your audience details and click Build to kick off the sync to Meta
- You will be able to edit the name of your audience directly on this page
- The build will commence immediately but could take up to 24-48 hours for Meta to process
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Mention Me will hash the email addresses to ensure that no actual email addresses are sent to Meta
Once your audience build has commenced, you will be taken to the summary screen where you can:
- View all your built audiences with the number of contacts per audience
- Build a new audience
Your audience will be updated weekly with any new customers that meet the selection criteria
Top Tips:
- Effective audiences must have a minimum of 1,000 contacts. Still, the match rates of your referrers' email addresses to Meta can vary, so you should be looking at 5,000 contacts as a realistic starting point.
- If you find that your recommended audience is too small, consider creating another Audience based on the next valuable dataset.
- For example, start with “Existing customers who successfully referred a friend” and then create a new audience with “Existing customers who have shared”
Step 5 - Build lookalike audiences in Meta
As soon as the Audience has been synchronised to Meta, you can create a lookalike audience to find new customers that ”look like” your best customers.
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Go to your Audiences. (You can also create a Lookalike Audience during ad creation in Ads Manager.)
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Select the Create audience drop-down and choose Lookalike Audience
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From Other Sources, choose the Mention Me Custom Audience you created via Audience Builder
- Choose the country where you'd like to find a similar set of people
Best practice: Meta will only create a lookalike audience based on a single country. If your Mention Me Custom Audience contains contacts from multiple countries, then create a new lookalike audience using the same Mention Me Custom Audience. - Choose your desired audience size
Best practice: Keep the reach between 1-3% in order to attract the best possible audience. - Select Create Audience
Top Tips:
- Once you're finished, it may take 6-24 hours for your Lookalike Audience to be created.
- Your audience will refresh every 3-7 days with new Audience Builder contacts
- You don't need to wait for your Lookalike Audience to update to use it
Step 6 - Create an Ad using lookalike audiences
Create a Meta Ad using the new lookalike audience.
Top Tips:
- When creating acquisition ads with new lookalike audiences, keep the ad copy the same as previous campaigns in order to compare results
- Meta will exclude any contacts who were in your source audience, it has no way of knowing whether the other contacts it finds are also your customers from other sources.
- To avoid targeting existing customers with campaigns aimed specifically at leads, you should set up a Meta exclusion to exclude any non-Mention Me audiences you may already have.
- Keep on experimenting with multiple different Audiences to see which ones deliver the best results
- Compare your ad performance against previous purchase and CRM (customer list) based audiences.
