Facebook Custom Audiences (Actions)

• A source already set up.
  • For Reverse ETL: If you don't yet have a Reverse ETL source, follow the instructions in Segment's Reverse ETL documentation. Segment recommends setting an External ID as the primary key for your Reverse ETL model, as you'll need an External ID to remove users from your custom audiences.
  • For Engage Audiences: An Engage Audience that you can connect to this destination.
• A Facebook account with ads_management permissions for the target Facebook Ad Account(s). The Facebook Ad Account(s) must also be associated with a Facebook Business Account.
• Ensure that the user connecting to the destination using OAuth has at least an Advertiser or Admin role on the ad account. To manage permissions and roles for an ad account, reference Facebook's documentation.

1. From your Segment app, navigate to Catalog > Destinations and search for "Facebook Custom Audiences (Actions)".
2. Select the Facebook Custom Audiences (Actions) destination and click Add destination.
3. Select the source you'd like to connect to your Facebook Custom Audiences (Actions) Destination and click Next.
4. Enter a name for your destination and click Create destination.
5. Navigate to your destination's settings page and click Connect to... to authenticate with Facebook.
6. Return to the Segment app and enter your Advertiser Account ID. See Facebook's Find your Facebook ad account ID number documentation for more information.
7. Save the changes you've made and Enable your destination.

Follow these steps to connect to an Engage Audience.

1. Navigate to Connections > Destinations, search for the Facebook Custom Audiences (Actions) destination you just created, and click on it.
2. Navigate to Mappings > New Mapping and click on the Sync Audience tile.
3. You don't need to change the Sync Mode or event-trigger settings.
4. If you plan to sync additional user profile traits or identifiers to Facebook, configure the fields in the Map Fields section.
5. Click Save.
6. Back on the Mappings tab, enable the Sync Audience Action.

Next, connect your Engage Audience to the Sync Audience Action.

7. Navigate to Engage > Audiences, then select the Audience you'd like to sync.
8. Click Add Destination then select the Facebook Custom Audiences (Actions) destination you created in previous steps.

• Configure the Advertiser Account ID and Description fields.
• Optional: Click Customized Setup if you want Engage to sync additional user traits or identifiers to the destination. Note that you must have already mapped these traits and identifiers in the Sync Audience Action (in step 4).

9. This destination supports the Identify and Track methods. Both work in the same way. If you're using Track, there's no need to set an event name as the destination ignores any set event name.
10. Click Save to apply the changes, then click Add 1 Destination to save the destination configuration.
11. After a period of time, Segment syncs the Audience to Facebook.

Follow these steps to connect to an Reverse ETL source.

1. Navigate to Connections > Sources and select your Reverse ETL source.
2. On the Models page, select the model you'd like to use and click Add Mapping.
3. Select the Facebook Custom Audience (Actions) destination and the Sync Audience action.
4. On the Set up mapping page, select the desired Sync Mode. The default is Mirror, which syncs new rows, changes to rows, and row deletions.
5. Select or create an audience in Facebook to sync your data with.
6. Click Select or create an audience in Facebook to save the audience ID to your mapping.
7. Map your model columns to the appropriate Facebook Custom Audience parameters. For more context about data formatting, see the Sync Audience and Data processing documentation.
   • Map External ID to a unique user identifier from your system (like User ID, CRM ID, or anonymous ID.) Segment recommends using the External ID column as your primary key when setting up your Reverse ETL model so you can more easily remove users from your custom audience. External ID is the only field Facebook requires.
   • Segment recommends mapping as many parameters as you have available in your source model so that you can increase your match rates.
8. Send a test record. If successful, you should see a 200 response in Segment and one added record to your custom audience. To verify that the record was successfully added to your custom audience, open Facebook Ads Manager and navigate to Audiences > {Audience Name} > History.
9. Click Save Mapping and enable the mapping.

Build your own Mappings. Combine supported triggers with the following Facebook Custom Audiences-supported actions:

• Sync Audience

Sync data to Facebook Custom Audiences.

Sync Audience is a Cloud action. The default Trigger is type = "track" or type = "identify"

To improve match rates, Segment built in normalization and hashing for common fields to align with Facebook's recommended best practices.

Segment automatically strips whitespace and converts the following fields to lowercase:

• Email
• First name
• Last name
• First initial
• City
• State
• Country

Segment normalizes the Phone field by removing any non-numeric symbols, whitespace, and leading zeroes.

Facebook requires you to hash all PII before sending it to the Facebook Conversions API.

Segment automatically hashes any of the following fields that are not already SHA256 hashed at egress:

• Email
• Phone
• First name
• Last name
• First initial
• City
• State
• Postal code
• Country
• Year of birth
• Month of birth
• Day of birth
• Gender

Segment Trait Enrichment lets you send an expanded list of identifiers or traits to Facebook so that it can use these additional data points to match your users to their user profiles. If you have this feature enabled and implemented any of these traits in your Segment tracking, the Facebook Custom Audiences (Actions) destination can send this data to Facebook.

When connecting to an Engage Audience, syncMode should be left as Mirror. When connecting to Reverse ETL:

• Mirror: syncs data when new rows are added, rows are updated, and when rows are removed.
• Upsert: syncs data when new rows are added or rows are updated.
• Delete: syncs data only when rows are removed.

If you're unable to create a new audience or select existing audiences while creating a mapping, this might be due to an authentication error. Verify that you've authenticated with Facebook under Destination Settings and that the Facebook user that authenticated with Segment can access your Advertiser Account ID.

Segment sends lists of users with the identifiers you've mapped from your source model. The matching logic itself occurs within Facebook. Facebook is more likely to be able to match a user profile if you track as many identifiers as possible, like email, mobile advertising identifiers (IDFA, Google advertising ID), and others. If Facebook is unable to identify users based on the data that you provide, then the match rate will be low.

As an example, many B2B SaaS businesses have users that sign up for their products with a work email address, like jane.doe@segment.com. However, most Facebook users sign up for Facebook with a personal email only, like janedoe@gmail.com. If you only provide Facebook with the work email address and no other identifiers, then Facebook can't match your user to the Jane Doe Facebook profile. This is the case for all identifiers: Facebook must have the identifier somewhere in a user's profile or they can't match on it.

While Facebook has a feature called value-based lookalikes, where you can send an additional field like LTV to optimize campaigns based on a customer's value, there is currently no way to sync LTV data to a value-based lookalike using the Facebook Custom Audiences (Actions) destination.

You can leave some fields empty when sending events to Facebook Custom Audiences (Actions).

If a value isn't available for one of the following fields, you can safely pass an empty string ("") to bypass Segment's validation.

• External ID
• Email
• Phone
• Mobile Advertising ID
• First name
• Last name
• First initial
• City
• State
• Postal code
• Country
• Year of birth
• Month of birth
• Day of birth
• Gender

As required by Facebook, Segment validates these fields to catch invalid or bad data, like / or -. Sending these values causes 401 Bad Request errors.

However, if you send an empty string for these fields, Segment processes your events correctly while still meeting Facebook's requirements.

You can send computed traits and audiences generated using Engage to this destination as a user property. To learn more about Engage, schedule a demo.

For user-property destinations, an identify call is sent to the destination for each user being added and removed. The property name is the snake_cased version of the audience name, with a true/false value to indicate membership. For example, when a user first completes an order in the last 30 days, Engage sends an Identify call with the property order_completed_last_30days: true. When the user no longer satisfies this condition (for example, it's been more than 30 days since their last order), Engage sets that value to false.

When you first create an audience, Engage sends an Identify call for every user in that audience. Later audience syncs only send updates for users whose membership has changed since the last sync.