Meta Custom Audience Integration

With the Meta Custom Audience integration, you can use Agillic to add, remove or replace recipients from your Facebook campaign audiences. Once the integration is in place, you must use a Meta Custom Audience Step in a Flow to control which recipient should be added, removed or replaced from a specific Custom Audience.

To set up the integration, you must have a Meta account and a Meta Business Manager. Also, as Meta Custom Audience is a third-party service, Agillic isn't able to offer support on how their service works. Therefore, we refer to Facebook for Business or Facebook for developers where their own documentation is available.

In this article, we will go through:

• What to know before setting up the Meta Custom Audience Integration
  • Meta Custom Audience Data Security
• How to set up the Meta Custom Audience Integration
  • How to map your data in Agillic
• Meta Custom Audience Flow

What to know before setting up the Meta Custom Audience Integration

In order to create and update Meta Custom Audiences to Meta Ad Accounts, you need to authorise Agillic to connect and update the accounts you have Account Advertiser rights to. The account rights are controlled in the Meta Business Manager.

Starting from July 2018, each individual user will need to accept the Meta Custom Audience Terms. You can also accept the Terms at https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/customaudiences/tos.

Meta Custom Audience Data Security

As Meta Custom Audience is a Third Party integration with Agillic, Agillic is following Meta's Data Security guidelines and Data Models. This means that all recipient data sent from Agillic to Meta's Custom Audience API is hashed using the SHA-256 algorithm. The hashed data will then be matched with related data regarding recipients on Facebook.

Info: SHA-256 algorithm is an industry-standard cryptographically secure hashing algorithm.

We do recommend you to map all necessary Data Fields in the Connectors Section in the System Settings, in order to get the best chances to get as many recipients matched on Facebook as possible.

You can find more information about the Data Security for the Facebook Custom Audience integration on Facebook For Developers.

How to set up Meta Custom Audience Integration

To set up the integration, you will need to enter the Administration module. Once set up is complete, you create your audiences in the Flows module.

First, this is how you set up the integration.

1. Log into Staging or Production.
2. Open the Administration module by clicking on the settings icon in the top right corner of the screen.
3. In the left sidebar, select Connectors under the Integrations section.
4. Scroll to the Meta Custom Audiences section. 
5. To authenticate the Meta account you'd like to create or update audiences for, click the 'Authorise and Test' button. 
6. A new browser window will open where you can log in to the Facebook account you wish to be linked to Agillic. 
7. After you've logged in, a window will eventually appear with 'Authorisation was successful!' if your account has the necessary rights.
8. Close the tab and refresh the Connectors page. 

The Meta Custom Audiences ready to be authorized and tested

A successful authorization between Meta Custom Audiences and Agillic

Adding more than one Meta account to the connector: 

If you need to add more than one Meta account to the connecter, it's possible by authorising them one by one. 

The first account is added as the above stepguide. In order to add another Meta account you will need to press "De-authorise", which visually will remove the already add'ed account, in order to be able to press "Authorise and test" again. Add a new account and when it's authorised the already added accounts will again be visible. 

Now, Agillic is authorized to update the Audiences of the accounts you've logged in with. Check the accounts you wish to use. Once an account is used in a Flow, it can no longer be un-checked. Facebook allows you to have 25 ad accounts integrated and listed in Agillic. 

Should authorization be removed via the Meta Business Manager, a warning text indicates that the account is no longer authorized. Any Custom Audience updates on unauthorized accounts will fail.

Next, you need to improve the match rate between the recipients in Agillic and Facebook users. This is done by mapping your Agillic data to a set of standard fields in Facebook. The more recipient details you transfer to Meta, the higher the chance of a match. As an email address is the primary indicator, the Person Data containing the email address must be transferred to Facebook. Map as many other Meta fields as possible. Leave the unknown or irrelevant ones empty.

The actual match rate can be checked in your Meta Business Manager.

Reauthorising the Meta Connector: 

The Meta connector has a limited life span for it's access token, meaning that after a set amount of time, the connector must be re-authenticated. The period is set for 90 days and just before the end of the period you will be sent a reminder to re-authenticate the connector on email. The reminder is sent to all emails registered within Agillic - Settings -  Alerts. Remember to add all relevant emails to this list in order to get notified. 

Read about how to do this here.

The re-authentication is done within Agillic - Settings - Connectors - Meta Custom Audiences by pressing "De-authorise" and hereafter "Authorise" again. If the connector isn't re-authenticated, it will stop apps from accessing user data from Meta and the accounts will no longer be visible within Connectors. This can be solved by pressing  "Authorise and test" in order to set up the integration again.   

How to map your data in Agillic:

1. Log into Staging or Production.
2. Open the Administration module by clicking on the settings icon in the top right corner of the screen.
3. In the left sidebar, select Connectors under the Integrations section.
4. Scroll to the Meta Custom Audiences section. You should see a line of green text saying 'Authorised and tested'.
5. Click the drop-downs to select new Person Data to map Facebook fields with. You can map 5 different types of Person Data to Meta: Email (required), MSISDN, First name, Last name, Gender, Birthday, and Country code.
6. Click the 'Save' button at the bottom of the page.

You have now mapped Meta fields to Person Data fields. Please note the following details when mapping your data:

• If you wish to transfer Gender, it should be of the format: m for male and f for female.
• If you wish to transfer Countrycode, it should be in a two-letter format, specifically in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2.

A Facebook Custom Audiences authorised and tested with 5 Person Data fields used for Facebook fields mapping

Meta Custom Audience Flow

To find out how to set up a Meta Custom Audience Flow, read our article All You Need to Know About Steps. There's a dedicated section on how to create Paid Media Integration Flows.

The Meta Custom Audience step allows you to add, subtract and replace recipients from Custom Audiences defined in your associated Facebook Account. Facebook have a minimum matching rate of 100 recipients in order to update the audience, if this isn't met Meta will not update (add or remove) recipients from the campaign.

Furthermore Meta require a minimum audience size of 1000 recipients. If the audience go below 1000 recipients it's not possible to remove recipients from the audience, as an audience below 1000 recipients, is no longer active.