Understanding audiences and traffic are essential when it comes to running paid ads. Having a basic understanding of where in the client journey your audience is and what type of traffic stage they are can drastically improve your paid ad performance. If you can master your understanding of these elements then you will be able to skillfully run paid ads on almost any platform. The problem is that most people aren’t talking about paid ads, audiences and traffic in this way. 

Let’s start with traffic! There are three main types of traffic when it comes to any funnel, paid ads or online business ecosystem. 

1. 1. 1. Cold Traffic – Someone who doesn’t know who you are aka they are cold in terms of the client journey. Meaning they have never had an experience or interaction with your brand
      2. Warm Traffic – Someone who has had limited interaction with your brand they have commented or engaged on a post, maybe they are on the email list but they have yet to buy something from you business
      3. Hot Traffic – This is someone who is on your list, has bought your low ticket offer and has probably contemplated working with you on a deeper level. 

Now let’s talk about the audience. For purposes of this blog, I am going to be referencing the audiences in terms of the Facebook Ads manager platform. It is important to note that nearly every paid ads platform has the ability to create these audiences the names just might be slightly different. Here are the types of audiences: 

1. 1. 1. 1. Cold Audience – Typically demographic based. For example, my ideal client is someone between the ages of 35 and 50. They are married with school age children and live in the suburbs, they shop at whole foods. Etc. etc. 
         2. Look-a-like Audience – This audience is still cold but it is created based on data that you have collected either via the Facebook Pixel, email list or page engagement.
         3. Custom Audience –  Custom Audiences are typically warm traffic or cold traffic. Facebook has a requirement that there is a minimum of 100 people inside the audience to run ads. They are customized based on a users action. For example, have you ever added something to your cart on a website then had the product follow you around on the internet? That is an ad created around a custom audience. There are lots of types of custom audiences so here are a few of the most common, website visits as a whole or a specific page on the website, Facebook Page visits, Video Views, Email LIst, Landing Page Visits, Purchases off of you Site, Add to cart, webinar registrations are a few of the prime examples. You may also hear people talk about retargeting ads, that is another name for a custom audience ad. 

You can also learn how to set these audiences up on facebook if you watch this youtube.

Now that you understand the types of traffic and audience you can then create ads based on whatever ONE next step you want your audience to take. 

Say for example you want to build your warm audience, you may want to create a facebook live and turn it into an ad (I’ll show you how here)  This is a tried and true and consistent way you can build a warm audience. The facebook live you create should be value packed and help move your ideal client one step closer to where they want to be. 

From there you would want to create a custom audience and run conversion ads to get anyone who watched your video to sign up for your email list. These ads will convert at a much lower cost per lead then if you were doing a cold traffic to email list ad. 

Lastly you want to create a re-targeting ad for anyone who visited your low ticket but didn’t buy. This ad typically has some urgency behind it and the goal of the ad is to get someone to purchase. 

What questions do you have for me around traffic, audiences and facebook ads?

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