How to set up cross-channel targeting
Most advertisers and marketers understand the importance of a great cross-channel strategy to succeed. This is especially when it comes to the biggest players: Google and Facebook. Within the digital advertising ecosystem, a cross-channel strategy is simple and straightforward to implement.
A cross-channel setup means that you can target users who have visited your website from several media channels, and then target them on Facebook with specific and personalized messages.
Suppose you are a fashion e-commerce company with a Google Search Campaign for sunglasses and a second campaign for backpacks. You can build audiences with users who clicked on these campaigns but didn't convert, and target them on Facebook with specific messages, depending on which kind of product they searched. Being really assertive to the user search behavior helps them in their purchase decision.
This example use case can be replicated and adjusted to almost any industry. It’s just a matter of understanding how to structure these audiences and ad sets on Facebook based on user behavior.
Building Audiences from URL Parameters
Explanation: Creating a Facebook Audience based on the PageView Pixel event and using the URL parameters as an additional field (see the example and screenshot below)
Note: The Cross-Channel Audience could be created with any additional parameter, not only UTMs. The important part is to identify your tracking specifications/particularities and set them up correctly.
The Cross-Channel Audience can also be done by creating an audience in DoubleClick (Search Ads 360). For example: add a custom parameter of the form ds_rl=XXXXXX
into the search campaigns you want to create the Facebook audience from. The custom parameter then appears in each of the keyword URLs allowing us to capture the traffic in the same way as explained above.
Limitations
It is good to keep in mind that building these types of Cross-Channel Audiences is only possible if you have simple and transparent tracking specs. If you use any kind of encoding or methods to hide or randomize your tracking parameters, it can be difficult to build the audience.