Meta Custom Audience
Overview
Section titled “Overview”Meta Custom Audience takes a list of customers you already have and matches it to Meta accounts, so you can target those people or deliberately exclude them.
Both directions matter. Target an audience to reach existing customers with a relevant offer. Suppress one to stop paying to advertise a free trial to people who already subscribe.
Signals keeps the audience current by syncing from your source, so you are not exporting a CSV and uploading it by hand each month.
Supported sources
Section titled “Supported sources”Sources supported by Meta Custom Audience
| Category | Supported |
|---|---|
| API | |
| CRM | |
| Database | |
| File & storage | |
| Warehouse |
Prerequisites
Section titled “Prerequisites”Before connecting you need:
- A Meta Ads account.
- A Meta Business Manager account, with access to the ad account the audience should live in.
- A Datahash Studio account with the target project selected.
- A source connected in the same project, configured with Audience as its Integration Type. The audience is defined on the source, not here.
Authentication
Section titled “Authentication”In Studio, open Destinations, find Meta, and click the Custom Audience tile. This connector uses single sign-on only; there is no manual credential path.
- Click Login with Facebook. A new window opens prompting you to log in to your Meta account.
- Click Continue, choose the business you want to connect to Datahash, and click Continue again.
- Grant the requested permissions and click Save.
- You are returned to Studio.
Configuration
Section titled “Configuration”Choose where the audience is written.
- Select the Meta Business Account ID you want to use.
- Select the associated Ads Account ID. The options here are populated from the businesses you granted during login.
- Click Finish.
| Field | Where to find it |
|---|---|
| Business Account ID | business.facebook.com, then select the relevant business. |
| Ads Account ID | From that business, All tools, then Ads Manager. Open the top navigation panel to see every ad account in the selected business. |
How the audience is built
Section titled “How the audience is built”This destination decides which ad account receives the audience. What the audience contains, and what it is called, are decided on the source connector.
On the source you set the Integration Type to Audience and choose the audience type. Every record must also carry an audience name. That is the name the audience gets in Meta, and it is what lets one connection maintain several audiences at once: records sharing a name land in the same audience, and a different name creates a different one.
Where the source is a CRM, you choose the field values that split records into separate audiences. Where the source is a file or a table, the audience name is a column like any other.
The audience refreshes on your source connector’s sync schedule. Change what the source returns and the audience follows on the next sync, which is what makes suppression lists worth maintaining here rather than by hand.
Manage instance
Section titled “Manage instance”To change the instance, open it from the Manage existing instance table, click the edit option in the menu to the top right, update the fields and click Finish.
Data & identifiers
Section titled “Data & identifiers”Signals sends the identifiers your source maps. Send identifiers already hashed where you can. Plain text also works: they are normalized and SHA-256 hashed before they reach Meta.
Required
Section titled “Required”| Field | When it is required |
|---|---|
| Audience name | Always. This is the name the audience gets in Meta. |
| Email address | Always. |
| Phone number | At least one, up to three. Include the country code, or the number will not match. |
| Mobile advertising ID | Only where you have neither an email address nor a phone number. Either the Android Advertising ID or the Apple IDFA. |
Recommended
Section titled “Recommended”Matching a customer list is harder than matching an event, because there is no click or browser signal to fall back on. Every additional identifier raises the share of your list Meta can resolve to a real account.
| Field | Format |
|---|---|
| First name | A first name or an initial. Accents are fine, and an initial may be given with or without a full stop. |
| Last name | The full surname. Accents are fine. |
| City | Letters only, lowercase, trimmed, no punctuation. |
| State or region | In the US, the two-character code in lowercase. Elsewhere, the region name in lowercase with no punctuation or spaces. |
| Country | The two-letter country code in lowercase, for example gb or in. |
Optional
Section titled “Optional”| Field | Format |
|---|---|
| Additional email addresses | Up to two more, one address each. |
| Gender | A single letter: f or m. |
| Year of birth | Four digits, for example 1987. |
| Full date of birth | Most common date formats are accepted, with or without punctuation. |
| Postcode | Lowercase, no spaces. In the US, the first five digits only. |
Best practices
Section titled “Best practices”- Send more than email. A list carrying only email will match a smaller share of your customers than one carrying email, phone and name.
- Keep formatting clean at source: lowercase email, phone in E.164, no stray whitespace. Hashing a badly formatted value produces a hash that will never match.
- Deduplicate the list in your source. Duplicate rows do not create duplicate audience members, but they make the size figures harder to reason about.
- Check the source sync schedule before relying on a suppression audience. A list that refreshes slower than your campaign changes will keep spending on people you meant to exclude.
- Include the country code on every phone number. A national-format number will not match.
- Keep the audience name stable. Changing it creates a second audience rather than renaming the first.
- Keep the authenticating user active and with access to the ad account. If they lose it, the sync stops.
Troubleshooting & FAQ
Section titled “Troubleshooting & FAQ”The permission screen does not complete. Confirm the account you are signing in with has access to the business and the ad account, then try Login with Facebook again.
No ad accounts listed. The businesses you granted during login do not include the one you want. Reconnect and select it on the Meta consent screen.
Audience not appearing in Ads Manager. Confirm a source is connected in the same project with its Integration Type set to Audience, and that it is returning rows. A connected destination on its own creates nothing.
Audience is smaller than the source list. Expected. Meta only counts records it could match to an account. Add more identifiers and fix formatting at source to close the gap.
Two audiences appeared instead of one. The audience name changed between syncs. Records carrying a new name form a new audience.
Audience is not updating. Check the source connector is still syncing, and that the records you expect still meet whatever condition defines the audience on the source.
Sync stopped. The Meta permission may have been revoked, or the authenticating user may have lost access to the ad account. Reconnect through Login with Facebook.