How to Use Facebook Custom Audiences to Improve Ad Relevance in 2025

Published on 25.11.2025 by Chizoba T

One of the benefits of advertising on Facebook is the ability to target your audience using custom audiences. Through Facebook ad targeting, you can ensure that your ad reaches the right audience, increasing the chances of conversion. In this article, we will guide you on using Facebook custom audiences to make your ad more relevant to your target audience. 

What Are Facebook Custom Audiences?

Facebook custom audiences are a powerful tool that enables your brand to connect with individuals who have previously interacted with your business. Your brand’s custom audiences are, therefore, the people who have interacted with your brand in the past. These could include your website visitors, their email addresses, app subscribers, or even subscribers to your retail store. The tool is a good choice to help you identify customers with the highest return potential.

Additionally, Facebook custom audiences allow you to fine-tune your audience to exclude those who may have taken a particular action. For instance, you can exclude those who may have already taken a specific action, such as subscribing to your app. By doing so, you ensure that you are using your budget most effectively. It can also help you in dominating the micromoments. 

The Facebook custom audiences also enable you to create a lookalike audience to target new customers who look like your previous customers. This ensures a maximum return on your investment.

Benefits of Using the Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook custom audiences can boost your ad campaign in various ways. This can bring multiple benefits, such as: 

Generate Affordable But More Qualified Leads 

When you reconnect with people who have already shown interest in your channel, you can use Facebook custom audiences to enhance your conversion rates. For instance, you can create location-based targeting to target people in their specific location, as well as their competitors in the desired market. This can enable businesses to see the consumers who are actively shopping for products in their niche, resulting in a highly relevant market segment. 

Increase Website Traffic

You can leverage Meta’s Advantage++ + to ensure that your ads are shown to the best-performing audience. You can retarget previous visitors to your site who didn’t complete their purchase. It is, therefore, an excellent tool for creating Facebook video ads.  

If your ad shows for a particular product they viewed, you can encourage them to revisit your site. Similarly, if some customers have previously purchased a specific product, you can upsell to them by targeting them with ads for related products. For instance, if a customer bought a laptop, you can upsell them an adapter or a laptop bag, luring them with a special offer. 

Increase Your Conversion

The goal of Facebook custom audiences is to increase conversions, ensuring more personalized and targeted advertising. This is because you can target the people who are interested in your business through actions such as purchasing a product or visiting a website. In addition, you can retarget users based on cart abandonment and past interactions, and promote relevant products to your past customers. You can also use the look-alike audiences to find similar customers.

Types of Facebook Customizations 

Facebook custom audience can be categorized into different categories, such as:

Website Activity (Pixel)

In this customization, you can categorize your website visitors according to the actions they have taken, such as the pages viewed. For instance, when you realize that a visitor views a product without making a purchase, this will be tracked by the Facebook pixel, enabling you to create custom audiences. 

You may have browsed a specific website, only to see Meta later showing you ads for similar products. That was an indication that the website was using retargeting ads for those particular products or services you had browsed on the internet. However, this customization requires a website Meta Pixel, a tracking code installed on your site to enable Facebook to collect its data. It is a good choice for creating custom audiences for different target ads.  

You can follow the steps below to create custom audiences for visitors to your site:

  • Once you are logged into Facebook, tap Meta Ads Manager.
  • On the left-side panel, click Audiences.
  • In the next window, select the audience source you need to create, which is your site. You can then click next.
  • The next screen will show you the website visitors Facebook plans to add to the custom audiences. Click on the drop-down menu labelled Events.

You will be provided with different targeting options, such as:

  • All visitors to your site.
  • Visitors to a particular webpage. You can filter these depending on URLs, including or excluding some keywords, or even the whole URLs. 
  • Time spent by visitors on your site. You can further categorize this by the top 5%, 10%, 20%, or more. 
  • A pixel event, such as a purchase. This can provide audience data on your recent customers. 

Depending on what you choose, keep refining your audience targeting to enable it to capture the right people. 

CRM Segments Custom Audience

This custom audience targeting focuses on the people who have engaged with your business in the recent past, such as customers or subscribers to a newsletter. That means you already have their details, such as phone numbers or emails, in the CRM or auto-responder.

To use this target option, you will need to download the data in a CSV file format. You can then upload and navigate to the audience page on Facebook, where you can click on the customer list. To start building your custom audiences, you can either:

Use Software such as Mailchimp. 

When doing so, you only need to click on “Import from Mailchimp”. You can then follow the steps provided to import either as a CSV or a TXT file.

Use the meta template to upload.

When doing so, ensure the file is well-formatted with the necessary details, such as name, phone number, and email address. You should also follow Meta’s guidelines. When done, click on Next. After building the custom audiences, let Facebook know you have added the customer values. 

These values, which are added to every customer, will show how important they are to your business. This is key to creating value-based lookalike audiences. Once you finish, click next. Now update the list with an audience name and description. 

Facebook will require you to confirm if you have mapped the data well with the right identifiers. Therefore, make sure you go through the list and that every detail is correct. You can now click Import and Create.

App Activity Custom Audiences

If your goal is to create a custom audience of users who are likely to engage with your app, consider using the app activity audience. For a more refined targeting, you can use the Facebook SDK to send app data. To ensure a more effective engagement, use the conversion or traffic objectives.

Start by registering an app and setting up the Facebook SDK. You can visit the Facebook for Developers site and log the events of the app. You can then follow these steps for creating custom audiences: 

  • Go to the App activity on the Custom Audiences page before clicking Next. 
  • Select the app you are importing the data from, and add the name of the audience and descriptions. You can then use in-app events, such as people who have reached a particular game level, bought something from the app, or have spent a specific amount, to refine the audience.  

In Conclusion

When people see that their ads are relevant to them, they are more likely to engage with them, resulting in a higher click-through rate and conversion. Therefore, start using Facebook custom audiences as outlined above and see your conversion and bottom line increase. You can also read our guide on selling on the Facebook Marketplace.