Connecting to your Meta Ads account
The types selected are those that contribute to your conversion and revenue reporting. You can change this selection at any time.
It is very important to have a Facebook pixel configured, as it allows Digital Ads to report revenue and conversions across all touchpoints, including views. It also helps Facebook optimize for conversions when creating lookalike audiences, and helps if you are tracking Last Click in Google Analytics. Read more about Facebook Pixel setup and conversion tracking in the Facebook documentation.
What are Custom Audiences?
Custom Audiences are lists of Facebook users that correspond to the contact lists and segments you create in Emarsys. Facebook creates these audiences for you by looking for user profiles associated with contact identifiers (such as email addresses, or phone numbers) stored in your contact database.
A Facebook audience must officially have a minimum of 100 contacts.
Emarsys recommends a minimum of 1,000 contacts for Facebook ad targeting. Read more about audiences in the Facebook documentation.
Meta (Facebook & Instagram) Lead Ads
There is a limit of 20 Meta Lead Ad subscriptions.
Meta (Facebook & Instagram) Audiences
For Meta's Lookalike Audiences, there is an option to target people based on similarity or reach. Both similarity and reach are for acquisition. The only difference is that reach uses slightly looser criteria to deliver a larger audience - perhaps 5% or 10% of the country or region's population - whereas similarity only delivers the top 1%.
For example, if you optimize for similarity in the US, you will get around 2M contacts because there are around 200 million Facebook users there.
For Facebook campaigns, additional Facebook metrics are displayed in campaign reports:
- Social Reach - This is how many Facebook users could have viewed the Ad.
- Like - This is how many other Facebook users liked the Ad.
- Comments - This is how other many other Facebook users commented on the Ad.
Filtering your audiences further with Facebook’s own data
When you create an Automation program or a Segment audience, you can also choose to further filter that audience using Facebook's own data. By selecting this option, you can limit the contacts that Facebook includes in the audience:
- Location - You can filter by one of the following: city, country or region (these refer to the Facebook profile, not your Emarsys contact properties). Multiple selections are possible within each option.
Facebook will only create a lookalike audience based on a single country or region. To target prospects in more than one country or region, you will need to create multiple lookalike audiences based on the same source audience.
- Languages
- Gender
- Age
- Interests - These are the interests that Facebook users have included in their profiles. You can drill down through the hierarchy of categories that Facebook offers, and next to each category is the total number of Facebook users worldwide who share that interest.
Meta (Facebook & Instagram) specific FAQ
How to solve the error message "There is no conversion pixel configured"?
This message appears if you have not configured any Facebook conversion pixels (to enable Digital Ads to report revenue and conversions across all touchpoints) as described on the following pages: Facebook Pixel Setup and Conversion Tracking, or if the Google Conversion Tracking Tag is not configured as described on the Google Ads help page.
If you have checked the configuration, and it is correct, then this error message is displayed because there was no conversion activity in the last 7 days.
How can I control how many of my ads will Facebook users see?
There is currently no capping functionality available within Emarsys, but Facebook limits News Feed ads (desktop and mobile) to 2-3 impressions per user per day. Therefore, if you exclude right-side ads from your campaign, you will automatically have this default capping in place. If you do include right-side ads, you will not be able to control how many ads users see in total.
How is this different from Facebook Custom Audiences?
Facebook Custom Audiences is a Facebook targeting solution that allows marketers to match their own contact lists with user profiles on Facebook. Digital Ads takes this functionality and integrates it seamlessly into the Emarsys platform, meaning you can:
- Use Emarsys' sophisticated segmentation (customer lifecycle stages, email responses, purchase and browsing history, etc.) to create highly specific micro-segments.
- Create your ads and audiences within Emarsys, ensuring consistent messaging across all channels.
- Use automations to add Facebook to your automated engagement campaigns, adding and removing contacts in real-time based on their behavior.
- Improve your return on ad spend (ROAS) by targeting contacts at specific times and for shorter periods of time with highly personalized content that matches their stage in the customer lifecycle.
This means that Digital Ads takes the basic premise of Facebook Custom Audiences - finding and engaging with your customers on Facebook - and turns it into real-time, 1-to-1 targeting.
What if an existing contact submits the Facebook Lead Ads form?
When a contact that already exists in your Emarsys database submits a Lead Ads form, the external event Digital Ads: Existing Lead (see The Lead Ads external events).
The lead ad subscription can be configured to update existing contact fields or ignore any existing contacts.
How do Lead Ads subscriptions affect my Facebook Ads budget?
Lead Ads is in no way tied to your ad budget or bidding strategies, and there are no additional costs based on traffic or conversions.
Do new registrations through Lead Ads have opt-in?
The lead ad subscription can be configured so that contacts automatically have opt-in.
However, we recommend that you include an opt-in confirmation link in the first welcome email to these new contacts, and only after they have clicked this link should they be considered to have opted in.
What if an expected Facebook page is not listed on the Create Facebook Lead Ad Subscription wizard?
If an expected Facebook page is not listed in the Facebook Page drop-down in the Create Facebook Lead Ad Subscription wizard, make sure that the Facebook user account used to connect to the Ads account has the correct permissions to access the Facebook page. It must have one of the following roles to see the Facebook Page listed: Admin, Editor, Moderator, Advertiser, or Analyst.
In addition, the Facebook Page will also need Admin rights.
However, an Advertiser, Analyst, Editor, or Moderator will not have permission to create a lead ad subscription, so the Admin role is recommended for Facebook Pages.
Read more about the different page roles and what can they do in the Facebook documentation.
Meta Ads account for Digital Ads has been disconnected
In case of custom audiences, your Facebook connection with Digital Ads can be disconnected due to the reach of asset limit on Facebook's end, which is 500 audiences/account. To resolve this issue, please delete some unused audiences in Digital Ads until you do not exceed Facebook's limit, since deleted audiences on Emarsys' end will not contribute to the number of the limit.