Why You Should Automate Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook has managed to create the holy grail of laser-focused marketing, allowing you not only to reach your customers on Facebook, but also find more customers like your best ones. If you've used Facebook Custom Audiences or Lookalikes before, then you probably know by now how powerful they are. However, manually uploading audiences as CSVs every so often can be inefficient and doesn't scale.

Here's why we think automatically syncing your audiences is essential, and why we built the Driftrock Audience Sync:

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1. It saves time by removing the need for manual CSV exports and uploads

Doing it the normal way, updating Custom Audiences requires you to export email data from your CRM system/Email system or wherever you store your data into a CSV file, and then upload that CSV to Facebook.

Assuming that you are making the most of Custom Audiences, you will be using several of these in your ads and constantly updating each of them is a massive pain in the proverbial. Automating this process allows you to dedicate more time to optimising your Facebook campaigns - which is the best way to successful and profitable Facebook ads anyway!

2. It allows you to show only the most relevant ads at all times

Custom audiences are great for many things, including reaching people who don’t open your emails, driving leads down the sales funnel and reengaging lost customers, but you don’t want them to be spammy! Having lists that are always up-to-date is crucial to ensuring that each Facebook ad reaches only the people who are meant to see it at that moment.

This also includes opt-outs - if someone opts out of being contacted by you, you should not be showing them Facebook ads with Custom Audiences, so by syncing your mailing lists and segments you can be sure you're following the Terms & Conditions.

3. It saves the wrong people from seeing your ads

Related to the previous point, you can also use Facebook Custom Audiences to exclude people from viewing your ads. How many times have you visited a website and bought something, only to immediately after see retargeted ads for that same website, promoting the product you just bought, or worse - a discount for new customers that you were unaware of!?

By excluding some Audiences from ads and keeping them up-to-date you can ensure that you are not only saving your budget from going to waste, but also reaching people who will benefit from seeing your Facebook ads.

4. Scale, scale, scale!

Like we mentioned earlier, Facebook Custom Audiences are so great because they allow you to run really, really focused ads. This means you can run very relevant ads for people depending on their characteristics - if they are male or female, if they have bought, if they have bought more than 3 or 10 products, if they regularly buy shoes, prefer buying t-shirts etc. Managing and updating each of these countless Custom Audiences manually means that it is nearly impossible.

So, how do you do it?

Automating the process allows you to scale your Facebook activity very quickly.

We've built a tool that makes this incredibly simple to setup. It's free to get started, takes 15 minutes to setup, and syncs your Custom Audiences every 3 hours!

Step 1.

Sign up for your free Driftrock account to get started.

Step 2.

Connect your Facebook Ads account. We connect via Facebook's API so we can automatically upload and create your audiences.

Step 3.

Click "Create new audience" if you want to create a brand new automated Custom Audience, or you can click "Automate this" on any existing audiences.

Step 4.

Work your way through the short wizard. Choose your CRM/Email tool from the list of data sources and allow Flow to access your list to pull the data from.

If we don't have an integration for your tools yet just drop us a line! We're always adding new ones.

Step 5.

Select the customer segment/tag/category you want to use for the audience.

Start syncing!

Hit Finish and you're are done! Your customer segment/email list will now automatically sync with Facebook Custom Audiences every 3 hours.

Send us a message if you get stuck during the set up (just hit Support in the top bar).

Have fun, and let us know how you get on!