Creating a Custom Audience
Once you have set up an integration with Facebook, you are ready to build and populate Custom Audiences.
The creation of the audience will be in 2 steps:
- Creating the Custom Audience on Facebook
- Linking it to an Audience in Actito
Creating an Audience on Facebook
Go get started, you need to create your audiences in the Meta Business Suite.
If you want detailed information, please follow the Facebook documentation about Audiences. Nevertheless, we will go through the creation process with the specifics of the integration with Actito in mind.
Reviewing your audiences on Facebook
From the 'All tools' button in the sidebar of the Meta Business Suite, select 'Audiences'.
Your existing Facebook Custom Audiences can be used directly if they are the 'Customer List' type. Other types of Audiences are populated from other sources, such as your website, your Facebook page,... : they cannot be populated through Actito.
Creating a new audience
If you need a new specific audience for the Actito integration, click on 'Create Audience' and select 'Custom Audience' (If you are creating your first Audience, directly click on 'Create a Custom Audience').
Only 'Custom Audiences' can be synchronized with Actito. 'Lookalike Audiences' are not compatible, even if they're based on a 'Customer list'.
Select the 'Customer list' source, which allows to send list of customers to your audience. This is the only type that can be used to push the data from Actito.
To be able to create a 'Customer list' audience, you must be the admin of an Ad account connected to Meta Business Manager.
Estimating the Audience size
After it is created, you can edit the columns in the top right corner to display the 'Estimated Audience Size'.
This metric estimates how many accounts are in the audience.
Indeed, for privacy reasons, Meta does not allow you to see exactly which personal accounts are in your audiences and your ads. Unlike with the targeting feature of Actito, you won't be able to retrieve a full list of profiles (Accounts Center accounts in Meta) with their personal information. Your audiences on Facebook are therefore fully anonymized.
Managing Audiences in Actito
Once you have created your audiences on Facebook, you will be able to create the corresponding audiences in Actito.
To do so, go to the 'Manage audiences' app (Catalog > Audiences > Manage audiences) .
In the application, you have an overview of all active audiences in your license, with the possibility to apply filters on the database.
Creating an audience
Click on 'Create an audience' to start the creation of a new audience.
First, you will have to choose the integration on which the audience will be created.
An integration is the link between 1 Actito database and 1 Facebook Ad account.
See Getting started with Facebook Audiences to set up your integration.
Secondly, you will create the audience itself in Actito.
- Give a Name to the audience. For clarity purposes, we advise you to give the same name to your audiences in Actito as the corresponding Facebook audience.
- The Database and the Entity tied to the audience are determined by the settings of the Integration chosen at step 1. They cannot be modified.
- Select the Facebook Audience in the dropdown list. Thanks to the integration, all Custom Audiences previously created on the associated Facebook Ad account will be available for selection.
Click on 'Save' to finalize the creation of the audience in Actito.
An audience in Facebook can only match one single audience in Actito. If you already have created a corresponding audience and want to create a new one, you will have to first 'deactivate' the old one.
You can also 'rename' it: indeed, its name is the main parameter of an audience.
Why create corresponding audiences?
As explained above, audiences on Facebook are anonymized and their sizes are estimated.
This is not the case on Actito: you get see the exact number of profiles who were assigned to an audience, and thanks to the targeting module, you can retrieve the members of this audience.
However, there might not be a 1 to 1 match between your audience in Actito and on Facebook. Indeed, while all the profiles will be pushed into the Facebook audience, they might not have a Facebook (or Instagram) account, or their account might have been created on another e-mail address than the one used in your database.
Understanding the synchronization principles
The synchronization between your Actito profiles will be in 2 steps:
- First, assigning profiles from your database to the Audience in Actito (through audience rules or scenarios). You can see the exact number of profiles in an audience, and when the last update was made.
- Secondly, the Actito audience will be synchronized with the corresponding audience on Facebook. All profiles in the audience with an e-mail address (or phone number) matching a Facebook account will be pushed in the Facebook audience. But as the data is anonymized in Facebook, you will only get an estimation of the number of profiles successfully synchronized.
The synchronization is one way: it allows you to select profiles in Actito to put in your Facebook audiences. But it cannot retrieve information from Facebook (apart from estimates). For instance, it cannot retrieve Facebook accounts subscribed to your Facebook page to create new profiles: you should use standard data flows (profile imports, API, ETLs) to import them into Actito.
The synchronization with Facebook runs once per hour, with the reference time being the 'Activated on' moment.
Navigating in the 'Manage audiences' app
The column of the application give useful information about the definition of your audience, its members, and the synchronization with Facebook.
Viewing the definition of an audience
Select an audience and click on 'View definition' to review the details of the audience and of its members.
This includes:
- The name of the Actito audience
- The database and entity to which it is tied
- The creation and activation moments of the audience
- The number of members in the audience. 'Nb members' is the number of profiles from your database who have been assigned to the Actito audience and does not necessarily match the number of Facebook accounts in your Facebook audience.
- The moment when the members of the audience were last updated. Whenever a profile is added to or removed from the audience by any mean, the 'Last member updated on' value will be updated.
Profiles with a negative Marketing consent cannot be synchronized with Facebook due to GDPR reasons. If such profiles were supposed to enter an audience (through a scenario or an audience rule), they will be filtered. A 'negative consent' interaction will be displayed on their profile, but it will not update the 'Nb members' and 'Last member updated on' values.
Viewing the synchronization details
Whenever a profile is added to or removed from the audience, Actito will attempt to synchronize its members with Facebook. This is an asynchronous operation that runs once per hour, with the reference time being the 'Activated on' moment.
You can see when the last synchronization occurred in the 'Synchronized on' column.
When a member update occurs, the 'Synchronized on' column gets emptied until the next hourly synchronization runs.
This way, you can easily see whether the synchronization is up to date.
When a synchronization is up to date, you can click on 'View synchronization details' to check:
- The status of the synchronization: if it encountered an error, it will be reported here.
- The moment of the last synchronization.
- The actions applied in the synchronization, namely the number of profiles added to or removed from the audience. If a profile is deleted in the Actito DB , they will also be removed from the audience in Facebook.
Data in Facebook is anonymized, and Facebook does not give confirmation whether any e-mail address (or phone number) really belongs to a Facebook account.
The number provided in the synchronization details therefore corresponds to the changes pushed by Actito into Facebook, but not necessarily to the number of accounts added or removed in the Facebook audience.
Viewing the status of the Facebook audiences
Facebook does not give detailed numbers regarding the number of profiles in an audience (see above), but it is possible to obtain an estimation.
When an audience has been synchronized, click on 'More', then 'View linked audience & integration'.
This feature displays the name of the audience (as defined in Facebook), as well as the estimated audience size, just like the information that you can view in the Meta Business Suite.
Depending on the size and the synchronization status, you can also view the status of the audience. For instance, an audience with less than 1000 accounts is deemed too small to be effective.
Searching the members of an audience
Because of the synchronization with Facebook is done in 2 steps, there are 2 concepts available in the criteria of the Audience Targeting module.
- Is member/ Is not member: checks whether the profile has been added to the audience in Actito.
- Is synchronized / Is not synchronized: checks whether the synchronization toward Facebook has run since the profile has been added to the Audience in Actito. Indeed, it is asynchronous and runs once per hour. We can only guarantee that Actito has pushed the profile toward Facebook, but because Custom Audience are anonymous in Facebook, we cannot know if there is a corresponding account. This criteria is only relevant if the profile is member of the audience.
Populating Audiences
There are two ways to assign members to an audience:
- Mass updates calculated every day based on targeting criteria thanks to Audience rules
- 1 by 1 updates through personalized journeys in thanks to a specific block in Actito Scenarios