So, you already know how to create a custom audience from your all website visitors (using the remarketing (a.k.a. retargeting) pixel) and advertise to them on Facebook.

You know that you can upload a list of your email contacts (from your MailChimp subscribers or simply from a copy/paste of emails from an Excel file) to use for Facebook advertising purposes.

Now let’s talk about creating an audience to advertise to based on what website pages they either did – or didn’t – visit.

How to Create a Facebook Custom Audience Based on Website Pages Visited

Begin by visiting your Ads Manager –> Audiences.

Next, click on the Create Audience button, then choose Custom Audience.

Choose Website option from the list shown in the pop-up.

This screen is where you add the website URLs that you need to track in order to segment a specific group of website visitors. First, toggle the dropdown menu at Website Traffic to read “People who visited specific website pages”. 

There are so many possibilities here. You can add URLs to track potential customers shopping for certain products or services. You could add a specific website page in the “URL Contains (include)” field and then choose to exclude anyone who also visited another page (like a ‘thank you’ page) if you wanted to gather website visitors who entered your sales funnel but didn’t complete their transaction. The one caveat here is that you max out at 10 specific URLs in a single custom audience.

Note: You can add more than 1 keyword or URL in the URL matches/URL contains field. You also have the choice of URL matches for exact match URLs.

Once you have your Facebook Custom Audience setup, you can watch it grow over time. Inside your Ads Manager, you can click on Audiences at any time to see the count.

Then all you have to do is choose this custom audience from the Saved Audience list when you build a Facebook ad.

Why You’d Use this Facebook Custom Audience Feature

If you have a lot of traffic to your site or if you sell a lot online, this powerful approach to Facebook custom audience creation is beneficial because you can segment your overall traffic into more specific buckets to be used for very specific Facebook ad campaigns. For example, we recently used this approach to Facebook Custom Audiences because a client had a product launch and wanted to capture all the people who visited her sales page but who did not visit any of her thank you pages. By setting up a Facebook Custom Audience with those parameters, she could build a custom audience to remarket to in hopes to still encourage them to make a purchase with her.

*Updated 4/20