If you have a list of your customers (e.g., emails, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs), you can target your ads to them by creating a new Custom Audience. View Tags are not yet permitted for Custom Audiences from your website clients. Only Atlas view tags are accepted at this time.
New custom audiences can be created from Library → Custom Audiences → Create custom audience → Add new custom audience. You can create the custom audience either by uploading a CSV or text file or by directly copying and pasting the contact information into Smartly.io.
Please note that Facebook will not include emails uploaded with @facebook.com addresses to custom audience. This to ensure that advertisers are creating high quality ads that meet Facebook's data consent terms of service.
Phone number formatting guidelines:
- Country code + Area Code + Number
- No leading zeros from country code
- Numeric characters only
Examples:
16505551234
16505551235
Uploading the contact information to Smartly.io /h3>
When adding custom audience through Smartly.io you first select the type of contact information and then upload the information from the file or by manually copy-pasting it. If you copy-paste the information you must remember to include in the first line the name of the identifier that you are pasting (Email, Phone, Facebook User Id or Mobile Advertiser Id)
After selecting the information that you want to upload you would be able to check the formatting of each column and correct possible errors. All the data that we send will be hashed before being sent to Facebook, but if you want to provide us Emails and Phone numbers already hashed you can change the name of the column to Email (hashed)
or Phone (hashed)
and we will avoid hashing those columns again. Only supported hashing algorithm is SHA-256.
Update 29th June: Custom audience needs to have file source defined
Facebook has updated their security policies regarding audiences and now every custom audience needs to select from which source the audience file was obtained. There are 3 options:
- Provided by users
- Provided by partners
- Provided by users and partners
On a longer explanation from Facebook:
"Indication of data origin: When uploading a customer file Custom Audience, the uploader will need to provide detail on the data origin of the customer file - noting if data was collected directly from users (first-party data), provided by partners (third-party data), or a combination of the two."
You can do the resolving in Ad Account --> Library --> Custom Audiences
Every existing Custom Audience has by default the value NOT_APPLICABLE and until 1 October 2018, campaigns using custom audiences without a source will continue to deliver, if the campaign was created prior to 2 July 2018. Starting on 2 July, new campaigns can only use custom audiences with a source. Custom Audiences won't be editable or cannot add new users if this parameter hasn't been updated.
Audience List will show for every Custom Audience the Source of the Audience if the source still has the value of NOT_APPLICABLE it can be updated clicking Resolve. Shared Audiences should be updated from the account that created the audience.