If video is part of your social media content plan (and it should be!), you’re in luck because Facebook lets you build custom audiences of people who viewed your videos. You can create audiences of viewers from whichever videos you want, and of people who viewed for different amounts of time. Then when it comes to advertise a new video you made, you can select one of your custom video audiences for your ad.
There are 3 types of videos you can add to your Facebook custom audiences:
- Facebook Live videos
- Direct uploaded video files
- Photo slideshow “videos”
How to Create a Facebook Custom Audience from your Videos
From your Ads Manager dashboard, click on the icon with the 9 dots, then click on the Audience icon.
Click on the blue Create Audience button, and then Custom Audience.
From the Create a Custom Audience pop-up, choose Video in the Use Facebook sources section.
Now you are at the point of building your video audience. You should create multiple video audiences based on different amounts of time/percentage of video watched. Your first selection to make when creating your custom video viewer audience is the amount of time your video(s) were viewed. Facebook ThruPlay means people who watched at least 15 seconds of your video or the entire video if shorter than 15 seconds.
Give your video view audience a name. I like labeling it with the amount of time or percentage viewed, but it’s important to name it something that makes sense for you. If you get thousands of video views on any given Facebook video, you may want to name your view audience after that video itself, but keep in mind that your total count of video views includes all those people who “watched” for as little as 3 seconds (which equates to the amount of time it takes someone to scroll/thumb through their Facebook feed to see new content). If you want an audience of more engaged viewers and enough of them to build a decently-sized custom audience, you’ll likely need to pull them from multiple videos.
You also need to decide how many days in the past you want to go back with your audience. The more recent viewers, the better. But again that comes down to the number of views you get from your videos. To have a larger audience to advertise to, you may need to go the full 365 days out. Click on the Choose Videos link to select the video(s) you want to use for this custom audience.
Select one or more videos to use to create your Facebook custom audience. Then click the blue Create Audience button. It takes some time for your new video custom audience to populate. Once it’s done, you’ll be able to check your audience size by visiting your Audience tab.
TIP #1: As you add more videos to your Facebook Page (either Live or by direct uploading a video file), you can edit your existing custom video audiences to add in those newer videos.
TIP #2: If you create a lot of videos, consider building video views audiences by subject matter. To use our business as an example, I could have 1 video views audience based on Facebook ads videos and another on SEO videos.
Your video views custom audiences can be used the same way as all your other custom audiences; just select the one you want to use when building your next ad.
Thanks for your very informative article! I’m trying Video Ads and creating Custom Audiences from the views but have a question no one seems to be able to answer. I did 2 videos that collected 800 views 75% or better but when I create a CA from these videos, I get only 50 populating the CA. I expected that it would be equal or close to the number of views that facebook is telling me it received. I’ve been told it takes time to populate completely – I created this CA 4 days ago now – does it take longer. Am I understanding how this works, or am I doing it wrong? Thanks in advance for any input you give!
Hi John! To make sure I’m understanding…do the 2 videos combined have a total of 800 views? And then you are trying to create a custom audience at 75% or better of those 2 views? If that’s the case, then the likely explanation would be that only 50 people watched those videos at least 75%. Facebook (unfortunately) counts a “view” after only 3 seconds. So many of those 800 views wouldn’t qualify for your custom audience of at least 75%. Hope that helps!
Oh boy! Wish it were that simple. Facebook shows 800 Views 75% or more on the two videos and 7800 views of 3 seconds or more for the same two videos. But when I attempt to create a custom audience from this, it comes up 50 and 300 respectively. I think I’m understanding how this all works; it just isn’t working and no one seems to have an explanation. Submitted the question to Facebook but understand they’re not too good at getting back to people. Thanks for your input!
What is the age of the video? You can only go so many days back with your custom audience. It could be that most of the views are too old therefore they can be included in your custom audience.
Video are new — 2 weeks new
Hi, did you ever find an answer to your question? I’m in the same boat, thousands of video views over 10 seonds, 75% but I’m unable to create an audience, the audience tab says “less than 1,000 members of the audience.”
Hi Jonathan! What may be your issue is that the views took place outside of the date range included in the audience. Video views are one of the audience types that keeps only the most recent (insert count of days) in the audience. So if the time frame is shorter or the video is older, that would explain the difference between the total video views you see on the FB video itself and what’s in your audience.