Architect Channel: Facebook Custom Audiences

‘Facebook Custom Audience’ is an ad targeting option that lets you find your existing audiences among people who are on Facebook. It is a great remarketing option to engage with users outside of your app or website, via ads on Facebook.

Architect allows you to easily set up Facebook Audiences for all your users or based on specific user segments and behavioral triggers. These segments can be created on the basis of past user behavior, user properties, or a combination of past user behavior and properties. When using Architect for messaging channels, you can use every condition such as custom attributes or events to trigger Facebook and send users to the custom audience on Facebook.

How does it work?

Insider uses Facebook Ads API to connect to Facebook, and uses users' email addresses and phone numbers as identifiers sent to Facebook Custom Audience. Furthermore, what makes email addresses and phone numbers the most suitable identifiers is that everyone logs in to their Facebook account by their email or phone number. That said, please keep in mind that it has to be an email address or a phone number that the user uses for accessing their Facebook account.

When sending data to Facebook, Insider executes hashing according to the SHA256 hash. The audience can be updated anytime via API without the need for users to visit the website again.

After you’ve launched the journey, whenever a user reaches the given Facebook element, they will be passed into the selected Facebook Custom Audience, provided that the user uses an email or phone number that matches the one used for accessing their Facebook account.

Tips & Tricks

• In order to prevent populating audience data to a wrong advertising account, we recommend creating and using a dedicated Facebook user with permissions restricted to just one advertising account.
• Architect enables you to design smart journeys to reach the right users. You can use the Check Reachability element before adding the Facebook element to understand users who are eligible to be passed into a custom audience. You can take another action on users or send messages by channels in order to not lose users on the flow.
• Targeting a well-segmented audience is quite important because remarketing is a costly option to convert users. You can use advanced segmenting options for journeys to track users' past behavior and actions to pass them into a custom audience.

Requirements

Before setting up your Facebook Audience step in Architect, you need to ensure that you have the following items created and/or completed.

1. You need a Facebook Business Manager account to enable this integration.
2. You need a Facebook Ad Account connected to your Facebook Business Manager account.
3. Ensure that your Facebook Business Manager admin has granted you admin permissions to the Facebook ad accounts you plan to use with Architect and that you have accepted your ad account terms and conditions. Ad account users should have one of these roles in Facebook Ads Account: ANALYZE or MANAGE or ADVERTISE.
4. Accept Facebook’s Custom Audiences Terms for the Facebook ad accounts you plan to use with Architect. You can reach the link on the Settings page.
   

Use Cases

With Facebook Custom Audiences in your journeys, you can:

• Create sophisticated audiences for lookalike targeting,
• Retarget customers who might not have visited your website for a while,
• Retarget users who are less responsive to other marketing channels,
• Create audience suppression to prevent users from receiving advertisements when they’re already loyal consumers of your brand,
• Target high-value users via multiple channels and platforms (Facebook) in order to convert them.