Yesterday Facebook, the world’s largest social network, announced a new feature that would be rolling out shortly for advertisers, Website & Mobile App Custom Audiences. This new feature will allow site and app owners to target ads at Facebook users who have been on their website/app. The new product is being aimed at SME’s.

The way that it works is that if a user visits your desktop website then a cookie will be set on the visitor’s machine. When the user then accesses Facebook the cookie is read and an ad can then be presented to the user that relates to their visit to your website. This is similar to the way a lot of third party remarketing platforms already work on Facebook using the Facebook Exchange (FBX) program.

Here is one way that you could use the system. Let’s say that your website sells furniture and a visitor has been on your website, looked at a wardrobe but did not make a purchase. When that user next logs into Facebook you could present them with an ad that says “20% off all furniture with discount code FB10. Click Now!” You could go further and create specific landing pages for specific products.

At no point does Facebook reveal the identity of the person that has been on their website or clicked on their ad on Facebook to the website owner. Users will have the ability to opt out of receiving remarketing ads from specific companies.

Mobile App Custom Audiences work in the same way only in this case it is visitors to your mobile app rather than your website who will be targeted by your advertising. One neat feature of this is that if a user has not accessed your app for a while then you can create an ad on Facebook that will encourage the user to use your app again.

These new ad types are aimed at smaller businesses which do not have the budget to employ a third party remarketing company but would like to take advantage of the benefits that these companies can offer. Facebook itself will benefit as this will help to provide ads that are more likely to be clicked on by users. Not only does this increase Facebook’s revenue but it is also likely to lead to higher click through rates (CTR).

Social media is still a long way behind search marketing in terms of conversion rates due to the fact that when people are on social media sites they are not necessarily in the mood to purchase an item, they are there to do other things and so ads need to be really compelling to distract the user from their primary goal on the site. This sort of remarketing is one way that marketers will be able to achieve this task in the future on a much smaller budget.