Wistia Custom Audiences Help You Get More From Your Social Ads

If you tuned in to Change the Channel, or checked out this blog post, you’ve gotten a peek at our exciting Wistia Channels updates that create an immersive, brand-forward viewing experience — right on your site. But, we know that your site is just a part of your marketing focus. In fact, we have a hunch that you might be spending a lot of time uploading videos to Facebook and using those video views to build audiences for social advertising. We totally get that. There’s a ton of valuable viewer information and audience creation tools available on Facebook. We use these tools for social ads ourselves, but with a twist (more on that in just a minute).

It’s no secret that social media platforms like Facebook have valuable viewer data that marketers can use to reach new audiences. There’s just one little problem: When you focus on uploading all of your valuable video assets to Facebook, in exchange for their data and audience extension, you sacrifice how your content is consumed and you encourage your audience to spend more time on Facebook — instead of your own site.

“Uploading all of your videos to Facebook encourages your audience to spend more time on Facebook — instead of your own site.”

Here’s where that little twist that we mentioned comes in: What if you could use the best of social media — we’re talking about reach and scale — while maintaining the freedom to decide where to host your most valuable video content? Wistia Custom Audiences gives you the same ability to build valuable Custom and Lookalike Audiences for ads on Facebook and Instagram, but with viewer data from videos hosted on your own site.

With this new feature, you can engage existing audiences and find new ones, all while maintaining control over your brand, video assets, and viewing experience. That’s what you’d call a win-win-win, right? Let’s take a look at how Custom Audiences can help transform your social advertising.

Engage existing audiences and find new ones, all while maintaining control over your brand, video assets, and viewing experience.

Identify high-intent audiences and create smarter ads

With Wistia Custom Audiences, the possibilities for finding and engaging audiences are endless. You can identify high-intent audiences using viewer data right from Wistia. Find out which Channels they watch, cumulative watch time across videos, number of videos watched, and more, and use that data to build high-performing Custom and Lookalike Audiences in Facebook. With Facebook Custom Audiences from Wistia, you can easily:

• promote new or different content to your existing audience, or
• find new audiences that are similar to your own using Lookalike Audiences.

Plus, if you aren’t sure where to get started, we’ve made identifying valuable audiences even easier with our list of Suggested Audiences. These pre-made audiences allow you to target viewers who have engaged with your videos or Channels in a specific way.

Here’s what they look like in Wistia:

And if you’re ready to expand your reach, you can create Lookalike Audiences from your most engaged viewers, and find more people like them so you can grow your audience. Audiences that engage with your brand on your own site are valuable, and our hope is that you’ll find as much value in using this tool to engage your audience as we do.

Maintain control over your brand

When you host your videos on Facebook, you risk losing the attention of your viewers to distracting ads or unrelated videos. In exchange for audience targeting, your brand and message can be lost among a sea of cat videos — which are super cute, but probably aren’t doing your brand any favors.

Now, you can use the viewer engagement data from the videos on your site in your Facebook Ads account. Target people on Facebook and Instagram based on how they’ve interacted with the videos on your site (not on Facebook!), so you can create super-focused ads tailored to your viewer’s unique experience.

Keep your audience coming back for more

By creating these super timely and relevant ads, you can target the right ad to the right audience, which means you’re more effective in your targeting and more efficient with your ad spend. And once you drive traffic to your website from Facebook and Instagram, you can use our Channel Subscribers feature to convert those viewers into subscribers, so you can keep engaging with them long after they’ve logged out of Facebook.

“With these new features, you can keep engaging with your viewers long after they’ve logged out of Facebook.”

Get started today

If you’re interested in this new feature, Wistia’s Custom Audiences is available on our Advanced Plan. Check out these resources to set up the integration and get started today.