Retargeting with Website Custom Audiences (WCA) is a powerful method for converting your website visitors to sales or conversions. It’s recommended that you start collecting the Website Custom Audiences for future use even if you are not planning to use them yet. To collect a Website Custom Audience, you need to have a Website Custom Audience Pixel installed to your webpage.

Website Custom Audience Pixel

If you do not yet have WCA Pixel implemented, you can implement one by visiting Facebook's audience management tool or the equivalent section in Business Manager. Click on the Create audience button in the top right corner, select Custom audience and then Website traffic and follow the instructions. Most important is accepting the terms and conditions so that you can make the audiences next time inside Smartly. More help for installing the WCA Pixel can be found here.

If you want to confirm correct functionality of your tracking code on your website, you can use Meta Pixel Helper to validate your Pixels.

More advanced users might want to track website visitors not only using URL matching but also using custom events. This can include, for example, any button click on your website that doesn't change the URL. More info about custom data can be found from Facebook's documentation.

Creating a Website Custom Audience

After you have placed the WCA Pixel on your website, you can create new website custom audiences. You can quickly access the custom audiences section from the three-dot menu in the Campaigns view (Campaign Assets -> Custom Audiences).

Custom Audiences button → Add new website custom audience.

Here you can define which rules are applied when adding users to the WCA.

• You can, for instance, specify that only visitors of certain pages of your website are included. You'll also need to choose the number of days for which a website visit is included in the WCA.
  • This supports adding multiple conditions using AND/OR logic as well if you need to create more granular rules.
• If you had installed a WCA Pixel before creating the website's custom audience, you can choose to prefill the audience based on your website visitors up to the past 30 days by checking "Include events recorder prior to audience creation" box.

Note: In Facebook's tools, you can create a "Custom Combination" type audience, which combines several rules within a single Website Custom Audience. When these audiences are synced to Smartly.io they will be listed as "Combination" type audiences. Do note that Facebook does not support the exclusion of Combination audiences in campaigns, so you can only include them!

Advanced Rules

Several advanced rules are available in order to let you bid different amounts depending on the buyer intent of your visitors. eg. a visitor who's been 10 times on your website should be retargeted with a higher bid than another who visited only once and bounced right away. You can access the advanced rules from the "Add filter" menu below each selected Pixel event.

You can for example use the following rules:

• Aggregated value (Count): You can select a population who has completed the event (or visited a specific URL), N times. eg. include people who visited the category "cellphone" more than 3 times during the last 14 days.
• URL / Domain / Path: Only include people who triggered a View Content event when logged in to a customer account where the URL contains "exampleurl.com/account/"
• Aggregated value (Time spent, seconds): You can select a population who has spent more than X minutes on the website. eg. exclude people who've spent less than 1 minutes on the website.
• Custom Parameter: You can select a population who has completed an event with a date parameter where the parameter is in the next X days. eg. retarget people who looked for flights leaving in 3 days

To learn more about the advanced WCA rules and how to use them, have a look at our blog post here