How to Create and Utilize Basic Audiences When Running Facebook Ads

What Is Running Facebook Ads Based on Phone Number Data? How to Collect Customer Lists on Facebook? How to Create an Effective Customer Audience on Facebook? Facebook is not an easy “girl” who will just hand over user data to you. To “win her over” and extract valuable information, you need some clever tricks. Read this article to learn some methods for collecting Facebook customer audiences.

To run Facebook ads effectively, identifying potential customer audiences is crucial. So how do you create a high-quality Facebook customer audience? Let’s dive in. If you’re unfamiliar with ad setup, check out the guide: How to Set Up Effective Facebook Ads.

1. What Is a Potential Customer Audience?

Definition: A potential customer audience is a list of customers on Facebook who have purchased from you before. You can choose to exclude customers who have returned products, depending on the return rate.

How to Create It:

1. Go to Ads Manager → Click on the Assets tab → Select Audiences.
2. Click Create Audience → Choose Custom Audience.
3. Select Customer List → Click Add Customers from File.
4. Click Upload File to add your customer list.

Note 1:

A potential customer audience is a list of customer information collected from your business operations. The most common and accurate data points are phone numbers and emails. Since many sellers don’t use email marketing frequently, this guide will focus on using phone numbers.

Note 2:

Facebook recommends adding a country code before phone numbers. However, it can still recognize numbers without it. If you want to be extra cautious, add +84 before Vietnamese phone numbers.

For example, if you have two customers:

• 0936abcxyz
• 0912deghjk

When uploading the data, it should be formatted as:

• 84936abcxyz
• 84912deghjk

Tip: Use the “&” function in Excel to batch-add the country code quickly. The file should be saved as .csv or .txt format.

To ensure accurate and effective targeting, your audience list should be as large as possible. Similar to statistical probability, the larger the sample size, the more precise the results.

Note 3:

Not everyone registers their Facebook account with their primary phone number or links their phone number to their profile. Therefore, if you upload 1,000 phone numbers, your actual usable audience might only be 400. The average match rate is around 50–70%.

Note 4:

Facebook takes some time to process and update the audience. Wait at least 60 minutes before using the audience list.

2. How to Create Customer Audiences on Facebook

2.1. Creating an Inbox Customer Audience

What Is an Inbox Audience?

An Inbox Audience consists of users who have messaged your Fanpage, whether they initiated the conversation or received a message from your page.

How to Create an Inbox Audience:

1. Go to Ads Manager → Click on the Assets tab → Select Audiences.
2. Click Create Audience → Choose Custom Audience → Select Engagement.
3. Choose Facebook Page → Select your page and filter users who have messaged your page.
4. Select a timeframe (1–365 days) depending on the activity level of your page.

Note: It takes Facebook around 60 minutes to generate the audience, so be patient before using it.

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2.2. Collecting Customer Lists Using Facebook UID Tools

To collect potential customer data and run Facebook ads using uID audiences, you can use tools like iTarget or MassSpider to extract uIDs from group members in Facebook groups you’ve joined.

Important: You must be a member of the group; otherwise, you won’t be able to fully utilize the “spy” features of these tools.

For effective targeting, join groups that match your ideal audience. For example, if you’re selling dog-related products, search for groups using keywords like “dog”, “pet supplies”, etc.

Once the uID extraction tool completes scanning, a list of Facebook user IDs will be displayed within the tool’s interface.

3. How to Use Potential Customer Data

3.1. Using Customer Data for Facebook Ads via Phone Numbers

For those working on a small scale with a limited number of customer phone numbers, you should upload all the numbers into a single dataset. Once it’s loaded, you can combine it with its lookalike audience (explained below).

For those with a large customer database covering multiple product categories and price segments, I recommend categorizing your customers properly.

For example, if you’re selling backpacks, and you have budget backpacks under 200K VND for students and premium leather backpacks for 2 million VND targeting professionals, you shouldn’t mix these phone numbers into the same dataset. These customer groups differ significantly in age, preferences, and purchasing power. Instead, create separate datasets: one for budget-conscious customers and another for high-end buyers. The more organized your data is, the more precise your ad targeting will be. If you have multiple product categories and customer segments, continue segmenting further—just make sure each dataset is large enough for accuracy.

Customer data from actual purchases and inbox interactions are incredibly valuable and accurate. You can confidently invest ad spend on these datasets. The amount you allocate will depend on your advertising budget strategy, which I’ll discuss in a later article.

3.2. Using Inbox Customer Data

To make the most of inbox customer data, I rely on a classic yet highly effective approach. Whenever a customer leaves a comment on your fan page, respond to the comment and send them a direct message. This step is crucial as it reminds customers that their comment has been acknowledged and reinforces their engagement.

This method also prevents missing out on customer interactions. When multiple users comment, like, or share posts, notifications can become overwhelming, causing some comments to be overlooked. Messaging customers directly not only boosts response rates but also helps in creating an inbox customer dataset on your fan page.

Pro Tip: For large pages, manually responding to comments and inbox messages isn’t practical. Consider investing 199K VND/month in Fpage, a powerful tool for managing comments, inboxes, and sales operations. This tool allows you to respond proactively and efficiently to thousands of customers while also hiding sensitive customer information to prevent competitors from poaching your leads.

Inbox customer data is one of the most valuable custom audience groups because those who actively message your page are genuinely interested in your products or services. This makes them highly potential leads for your Facebook advertising campaigns. Even though this dataset may be smaller, it is extremely useful. Combine it with a lookalike audience to see impressive results!

Before fully utilizing the inbox dataset, conduct test runs. Set an appropriate budget to optimize your campaign’s effectiveness. Additionally, inbox and page-like audiences are excellent for testing new products, often yielding remarkable results.

3.3. Other Ways to Utilize Potential Customer Data

A dataset of past buyers is ideal for upselling and cross-selling:

• Upselling: If you’re selling a facial cleanser, which is a product with a short lifecycle, continue marketing the same product to past buyers to turn them into loyal customers. Optimize your content to prevent them from feeling spammed.
• Cross-selling: If customers love your facial cleanser and are happy with its effects—smoother, fresher skin—then they’re likely to trust your shop. This is your chance to introduce related products like hair removal cream, lipsticks, facial mist, or even clothing.

⚠ Warning: Avoid selling low-quality products, or customers will report your page, and you’ll face consequences. Also, if you plan to expand into different product categories, consider creating a separate page targeting the same audience (though this isn’t always advisable).

Upselling and cross-selling are excellent strategies for boosting profits, as retaining existing customers is much cheaper than acquiring new ones. “Take care of your customers, and they’ll take care of your revenue.”

This dataset is also useful for testing new products, as it provides accurate insights, similar to inbox and page-like datasets. Keep updating your dataset regularly—weekly if you have high sales volume, or monthly if sales are lower.

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Selling customer data is illegal. However, exchanging datasets with trusted partners who target the same customer segments can be a mutually beneficial strategy. Of course, this should only be done with highly reliable contacts, as your customer data and fan page are your most valuable assets.

If you share your potential customer dataset with someone and they resell it to 100 other advertisers, you’ll suddenly find yourself competing with them in ad auctions to reach the same audience. This could drive up your advertising costs significantly.

By now, you should have a solid understanding of how to collect customer data from Facebook. If you want to maximize ad efficiency, create a targeted customer dataset and run campaigns using phone number data. This approach will help optimize your advertising performance. Good luck!

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