Facebook Custom Audiences

Empower your marketing team to run highly granular retargeting and lookalike campaigns on Facebook

Overview

Deliver even more relevant ads by combining data from various sources within your data warehouse to build custom audiences for Facebook Ads. By keeping your custom audiences updated automatically, never show an ad to someone after they purchase the item you were promoting.

Supported syncing

For more information about sync modes, refer to the sync modes docs.

Getting started

Go to the Destinations overview page and click the Add destination button. Select Facebook Custom Audiences and click Continue. You can then authenticate Hightouch to Facebook Custom Audiences either with OAuth or with a system user token. Since the OAuth flow requires you to manually refresh this connection every 60 days, we strongly recommend using a system user token for indefinite access.

Authenticate with a system user token

When authenticating with a system user token you can choose to either use an existing one or create a new one for the Hightouch integration.

Use an existing system user token

If you already have a Facebook app and system user setup, open your Facebook Business account and navigate to Business Settings > Users > System users.

1. Select the system user you'd like to generate a new token for.

2. Select Generate new token. When prompted, select the relevant app and the ads_management permissions, then click Generate token.

3. Copy the generated token. Since this token won't be stored in Facebook, you may want to consider storing it in a secure password vault as well.

4. Back in Hightouch, select Use system user token as the Authentication method, then paste the token you generated as the System User Token, select the relevant Ads Account, and click Continue.

Create a new system user token

To create a new token, you first need to add a new app.

1. Open your Facebook Business account and navigate to Business Settings > Accounts > Apps.

2. Use type None, name your app, then click Create app.

3. Make sure the app has Ads Management Standard Access permissions. You can find this setting in App Review > Permissions and Features.

4. Navigate to Business Settings > Users > System users and add a new system user with Admin access.

5. Assign the ad account that you wish to create audiences for to the system user you created. Be sure to give it Full Control, not Parital Access.

6. Once a new system user account is created, select Generate new token. When prompted, select the relevant app and the ads_management permissions, then click Generate token.

7. Copy the generated token. Since this token won't be stored in Facebook, you may want to consider storing it in a secure password vault as well.

8. Back in Hightouch, select Use system user token as the Authentication method, then paste the token you generated as the System User Token, select the relevant Ads Account, and click Continue.

Authenticate with OAuth

For the Authentication method, select Log in to Facebook and log into your Facebook account.

Once successful, you will be redirected back to Hightouch to enter a descriptive name for your destination and complete setup.

Syncing data

Once you've set up your Facebook Custom Audiences destination and have a model to pull data from, you can set up your sync configuration to begin syncing data. Go to the Syncs overview page and click the Add sync button to begin. Then, select the relevant model and the Facebook Custom Audiences destination you want to sync to.

Custom audiences

Hightouch lets you create and maintain custom audiences via the Facebook Custom Audience API.

Field mapping

You can sync columns from your source to Facebook Custom Audiences default, custom, and Facebook-specific fields. If you send data for a custom field that doesn't exist, Hightouch adds the field and automatically detects its type.

Facebook-specific fields include:

• External ID is a custom identifier that you send to Facebook via its APIs or tracking pixels
• Page-scoped ID is used for Facebook messenger apps and Facebook pages

Audience type selection

You can create a new audience or use an existing one.

To create a new audience, you can define a name for the new custom audience or Hightouch defaults to the name of the associated model.

To use an existing audience, select the desired audience from the dropdown.

Handling PII and hashing

By default, Hightouch automatically hashes the following fields before sending requests to Facebook:

• Email
• Phone
• Gender
• First Name
• Last Name
• First Initial
• State
• City
• Zip Code
• Country

You can disable this behaviorin the sync configuration. If disabled, the data from the model should be appropriately normalized and hashed.

Share your audience

Optionally share this audience with another Facebook advertising account.

Delete behavior

You can choose how to handle user records in Facebook when the corresponding rows are deleted in your source.

Tips and troubleshooting

Common errors

To date, our customers haven't experienced any errors while using the Facebook Custom Audience destination. If you run into any issues, please reach out to us. We're here to help.

Live debugger

Hightouch provides complete visibility into the API calls made during each of your sync runs. We recommend reading our article on debugging tips and tricks to learn more.

Sync alerts

Hightouch can alert you of sync issues via Slack, PagerDuty, SMS, or email. For details, please visit our article on alerting.