Here’s how to build a Facebook custom audience for free using their built-in graph search feature. This method doesn’t use the API. This is purely gathering data from the public graph search page in a semi-automated way. The advantage of building a custom audience this way is it’s much more intuitive when doing searches and gives you more flexibility than the current software tools I have seen so far.

Download the “Scraper” extension for Google Chrome browser

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Here’s the link to download the Scraper extension.

Log in to Facebook and do a search for your target audience

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Quick Tip: To target people that may be a little more engaged with a page, use the “people that like photos by” search – e.g. “people that like photos by Ralph Lauren”.

Right click on the page and select “Scrape Similar…”

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It doesn’t really matter where you right click becuase you will be replacing the Xpath selector in the next step anyway.

Enter this into the Xpath selector field and click “Scrape” – //div[contains(@data-bt,’id’)]/@data-bt

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*Disclaimer – This selector path is working at the moment. If Facebook decides to change their page layout or structure then this may not work in the future – //div[contains(@data-bt,’id’)]/@data-bt

What we are doing here is scraping the page for each user’s Facebook ID. Facebook can use this value to build a custom audience for your ads.

Click Export to Google Docs

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Delete rows with irrelevant data

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You will need to delete any irrelevant data from the spreadsheet. The first 2 rows for example and usually the last row so you are only left with the data that contains user ID’s.

Enter this into the B1 field – =RIGHT(LEFT(A1,FIND(“,”,A1) -1),FIND(“,”,A1) -7)

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This will select only the ID from the first column text. =RIGHT(LEFT(A1,FIND(“,”,A1) -1),FIND(“,”,A1) -7)

Drag that cell down using the crosshair cursor to reproduce that function on other rows

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You can get the crosshair cursor by moving your mouse to the bottom right of the B1 cell.

Copy the contents of that column

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Open a new Sheet and select “Paste Special” – “Paste values only”

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This will give you a clean sheet of data that only contains User ID’s ready for export

Select File – Download As – Comma Separated Values

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Now you can upload this CSV file to Facebook as a custom audience

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