Facebook: Export Audiences

Sync your Lytics audiences with Facebook custom audience lists to target those users in the Facebook Ads platform.

• Implementation Type: Server-side.
• Implementation Technique: REST API with audience triggers.
• Frequency: Batch that continuously updates at an hourly rate.
• Resulting data: A Facebook custom audience populated with users from the Lytics audience selected.

This integration utilizes the Facebook Marketing APIs to send user data. Once the export is started the job will:

1. Create an audience in Facebook Ads called Lytics {Audience Name}.
2. Scan the Lytics audience and hash the selected user identifiers, i.e. email or phone or name and location, which will then be sent to Facebook to be added to the newly created audience.
3. The export will run continuously. As users enter or exit the Lytics audience, they will be added to a queue. The queue will be flushed and updates to the Facebook audience will be pushed every hour or until the queue reaches 10,000 users, whichever happens first. Users will be added or removed from the audience appropriately.

By default, Lytics exports the following fields to Facebook. Many of these fields are configurable.

Follow these steps to set up an Export Audiences job for Facebook. If you are new to creating jobs in Lytics, see the Jobs Dashboard documentation for more information.

1. Select Facebook from the list of providers.
2. Select the Export Audiences job type from the list.
3. Select the Authorization you would like to use or create a new one.
4. Enter a Label to identify this job you are creating in Lytics.
5. (Optional) Enter a Description for further context on your job.
6. Select your Facebook Ads Account ID. Note: If it says you "must accept Custom Audiences Terms" next to the Ads Account ID, copy and paste the following URL into your browser: https://business.facebook.com/ads/manage/customaudiences/tos/?act=YOUR_ADS_ACCOUNT_ID. Replace YOUR_ADS_ACCOUNT_ID with the account id you wish to use. There you can accept the Facebook Ads Custom Audience terms and conditions, and then refresh this list in the Lytics App.
7. From the Audience input, choose the audience of users to export.
8. From the Email Field input, select the field that contains the users emails.
9. If emails in your account are stored as a SHA256 hashes, then from the SHA256 Email input, select the field that contains the SHA256 hash of the user emails. Use this field instead of or in conjunction with the Email Field above.
10. Using the Field Mapping input, map the Lytics field on the left to a Facebook field on the right for a greater matching resolution. Lytics fields that are mapped to Hashed facebook fields are assumed to be already hashed appropriately for Facebook's API within Lytics. Note: The Lifetime Value Facebook field specifies the field that contains the lifetime value of this user. The Lytics field mapped to the Lifetime Value Facebook field should contain a positive numeric value. If this field is mapped the Facebook audience will be created as a value based lookalike audience. In order to use Lifetime Value audiences in Facebook, special terms must be accepted at https://www.facebook.com/customaudiences/value_based/tos/?act=YOUR_ADS_ACCOUNT_ID (you will need to replace YOUR_ADS_ACCOUNT_ID with your ads account ID) before creating a value-based audience.
11. Click on the Show Advanced Options tab to expand the advanced configuration.
12. Check the Existing Users checkbox to add users who already exist in the selected Lytics audience during the first batch sync.
13. From the Audience Source input, select whether data was collected directly from customers, directly from partners, or from both.
14. Optionally add an alternate Audience Name and Audience Description to identify the audience in Facebook. If left empty the default name specified above will be used.
15. Click Start Export.

The custom audience should appear immediately in Facebook Ads. When you begin syncing audiences, it may take some time for them to process within Facebook.

Immediately after export, in the Facebook UI you will see a size of Below 1000 and under this you may see the word Populating. Even if the audience is much larger than 1000 users, Facebook will always say Below 1000 if it is Populating. Facebook says about this state:

Audience Is Populating

We're finding people who fit your audience criteria. You can start running ads with this audience right away, but be aware that your audience size will increase as the audience is populated.

This process may take a number of days to complete.

If the exported audience has a lot of activity, such as an audience that has users enter/exit every hour, then the Facebook status may always say "Populating" since the job is continually sending new data to Facebook. If you would like to see the current side of the audience in the Facebook UI, the only way is to pause the job in Lytics on the Job Summary page for that job.

Once you've seen the audience size and want to continue adding users, you can unpause the job on the same page by clicking Resume. After resuming, the audience size may go back into the "Populating" and "Below 1000" state.

In addition to the size shown, in the Facebook UI, you can click through to the audience and see the Custom audience updated messages on the History tab to see the batches of users that were sent to Facebook.