App activity

Create an app activity Custom Audience

Creating an app activity Custom Audience is a great way to target ads towards specific groups of people who are most likely to take the action you want them to take on your app. Using the Facebook SDK, you can pass data to Facebook from your app and use that data to specify who you want to include in your Custom Audience. For example, if you use the Traffic or Conversion objective to run an app ad engagement campaign, your ads may perform better if you create a Custom Audience of the people who have already installed your app.

Note: Targeting options are limited to location, age and gender for audiences that include people under the age of 18 globally, 20 in Thailand or 21 in Indonesia. You can’t use detailed targeting, Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences or saved audiences to target your ads to these age groups. Learn more about the targeting options to reach young people, and how this update may affect your ad sets.

Before you begin

1. Register your app.

2. Set up the SDK and log app events on the Facebook for Developers site.

To reach users taking specific actions (called “app events”) within your app, you’ll need to set up your app events for each platform that your app is available in. This is done by sending an event from your app via Facebook’s SDK. This event can be one of 14 pre-defined events, such as “added to cart” in a commerce app or “level achieved” in a game. You can also set up your own custom events.

You may also choose to use a Facebook Mobile Measurement Partner for your app event measurement needs, and will need to inform them of which events you’d like to measure to ensure that you can send app events to Facebook.

Create your Custom Audience

1. Go to Audiences at the ad set level in Ads Manager.

2. Select Create new

3. Select Custom Audience in the drop-down menu

4. Select App activity

5. From the drop-down menu, select which app events you’d like to base your audience on.

You can either include or exclude people in your Custom Audience who have completed any of the listed app events. For example, you can include people who have either: opened your app, achieved a level, added their payment info, made an in-app purchase or completed a tutorial. Alternatively, you could choose to include people who have either opened your app or achieved a level, but exclude people who have made an in-app purchase.

Note: Make sure that you have the ad account rights to the app that you want to use. Bear in mind that your app needs to be measuring app events to create a Custom Audience from it. The app events that your app is set up to measure will automatically populate in the drop-down menu. You can choose how far back you would like your audience populated by based on when the event occurred for people using your app. For example, you can specify in the past 30 days to reach people who have completed a purchase event in the past 30 days.

6. Add details to the app events you base your Custom Audience on by selecting Refine by and choosing the type of details you want to specify.

For example, you can add a parameter to target your ads to people who have made an in-app purchase over a certain amount. If you want to target your ads to people who have made a certain number of in-app purchases, you can specify an aggregated value. You can also select people who have completed a chosen app event on a specific device type such as Android or iOS.

7. Name your audience.

8. Select Create Audience to finish.

Your audience is ready to use immediately, but it may take up to an hour for it to be pre-populated with users from the past who have logged a matching app event. You can always check the size of your audience by going to Ads Manager and selecting Audiences.