Audience

The mParticle Facebook Audiences integration allows you to forward mParticle audience data directly to a Facebook Ads Manager account for use with Facebook Custom Audiences, making it easy to target existing or prospective customers.

Prerequisites

Access to a Facebook Ad account

You must have Full Access to the Facebook Ads account you want to forward your audience data to. To check if you have Full Access:

1. Log into the Meta Business Suite at business.facebook.com
2. Select the Meta business portfolio you want to send your audience data to.

3. Go to Settings > Accounts > Ad Accounts, and select the Ad account you want to use. Click Ad account access.
4. Under “People with full control”, look for the Facebook account you plan to use when setting up the mParticle integration.
5. To assign full access to someone, click Manage next to their name. You can also assign a new account access by clicking Assign people and selecting their name from the list of people with access to your Meta Business portfolio.

Accept the Facebook Audiences Terms of Service

The Facebook Ads account you are connecting to must have accepted the following terms of service:

• Custom Audiences Terms of Service
• Value Based Custom Audience Terms of Service
• Web Custom Audience Terms of Service

To see if you’ve accepted the terms of service:

1. Log into your Facebook Ad account at adsmanager.facebook.com and click Audiences in the left nav bar.
2. Make sure that you have the correct ad account selected using the dropdown menu in the top right.
3. You should be prompted to accept the Facebook Audience terms of service. If you already have accepted these terms of service, you will be presented with the options to create new audiences:

Access to your Facebook Application ID

If you want to forward users’ Facebook IDs with your audience data, you must have the Facebook Application ID number for your app or integration. To find your Facebook Application ID, you need to access the Facebook Developer Dashboard. To find your Facebook App ID:

1. Visit the Meta for Developers website at https://developers.facebook.com/ and log in with your Facebook account credentials.
2. Click My Apps in the top nav bar.
3. Under the list of apps on your dashboard, you can find your App ID listed under the name of your app:

Once you have satisfied the prerequisites described above, follow the steps below to set up the mParticle Facebook audience integration.

Facebook audience integration setup instructions

Setting up and using the audience integration for Facebook includes three stages:

1. Creating a Facebook audience output in mParticle.
2. Connecting an audience in mParticle to Facebook.
3. Finding your new mParticle audiences in Facebook for use in a campaign.

1) Create Facebook audience output

1. Log into your mParticle account at app.mparticle.com, and navigate to the Integrations Directory.
2. Search for “Facebook”, hover your cursor over the Facebook tile, and click Setup.

3. Check the box labeled Audience, and click Configure.

4. Under Account Credentials, click Log In. This opens a separate window where you can connect your Facebook account to mParticle. Click Connect.

5. Enter a descriptive name under Configuration Name.
6. Use the Facebook Account ID dropdown menu to select the Facebook account that is tied to the Facebook Ads account you want to forward your audiences to.

7. Click Save & Open in Connections.

2) Connect an audience to Facebook

1. If you just completed step 1.7, then you will be brought to Audiences > Real-time in mParticle. Otherwise, from your mParticle account, navigate to Audiences in the left-hand navigation and select either Real-time or Standard.
2. From the list of audiences, find the one you want to forward to Facebook and click the “plus sign” + button under Connected Outputs.

3. Click Connect Output.

4. Select Facebook, and use the Configuration Name dropdown menu to select the new configuration you want to send your audience to. Click Next.

5. Toggle the Connection Status to either Inactive or Active. Only active connections will forward audiences. After completing the setup process, it may take up to 24 hours for your audience data to fully populate in Facebook.
6. Enter your Facebook Application ID. This is only required if you intend to forward Facebook IDs in the next step.

7. Check the box next to each of the following user identities you want to forward to Facebook with your audience:

   • Email address (hashed as SHA256)
   • Phone number (hashed as SHA256)
   • Facebook ID
   • Apple IDFA
   • Google GAID

Email addresses and Facebook IDs result in higher match rates with Facebook users because they are more unique across the Facebook platform, so it’s recommended to use these identities whenever they are available.

8. Check Enable Multi-Key Audience to have an additional audience forwarded to Facebook that includes all of the user identities you selected in the previous step.

   • mParticle creates a new custom audience in your Facebook Ads Manager for each identity that you select. For example, if you select both phone and email, you will see two new custom audiences added: one using user phone numbers and one using their email addresses. If you enable Multi-Key Audiences, you will still see a separate audience for each identity, but you will also see an additional audience that includes all of the identities you selected.

9. Check Match on User Attributes to have mParticle forward all available attributes from the following list for each user. This can increase the match rate for your audience. All user attributes are hashed as SHA256 before being forwarded to Facebook.

   • Gender
   • First name
   • Last name
   • City
   • State
   • Country

10. To create a value-based lookalike audience, check Is Value Based Audience, and use the User Attribute Representing Value dropdown menu to select an mParticle user attribute to forward to Facebook.

    • The attribute you select is what Facebook refers to when determining the relative value of a user, and whether or not to include it in the audience. Users with higher values for this attribute are considered more valuable.
    • To allow attributes with a value of 0 to be forwarded, check Allow Zero Values. Negative values are never forwarded.

11. Under Customer File Source, select one of the following as the source of your audience data:

    • Directly from customers: all audience data was collected directly from the audience members
    • Customers and partners: the audience data was collected both from audience members and from a partner, like a third-party agency
    • Directly from partners: the audience data was collected only from third-party partners

12. Select the identity you want to forward to Facebook as an external email address from the External Email Identity Type dropdown.

    • Including an external email address can help improve your match rate in Facebook.

13. Select the identity you want to be hashed and forwarded to Facebook for use as an external unique ID from the Multi-Key External ID Type dropdown.

    • This can be any unique ID, like an advertising ID, loyalty membership ID, user ID, or even a cookie ID, and can help increase your audience’s match rate.
14. Click Add Connection.

3) Find your new mParticle audience in Facebook

To find your new custom audience(s):

1. Navigate to your Facebook Ads Manager at adsmanager.facebook.com and log in.
2. Select the business portfolio containing the ad account that you used when setting up your audience connection using the left-hand navigation.
3. In the left-hand navigation, click Audiences.
4. After creating and activating your audience connection between mParticle and Facebook, you will see one or more (depending on your configuration settings) custom audiences added to your Audience list in Facebook Ads Manager.

5. To edit, share, or create an ad for one of your custom audiences, click the audience name from the list to view the details panel. From the details panel, click the Actions dropdown menu. Certain actions may be unavailable due to missing payment info or a compliance requirement that hasn’t been configured yet for your Ads account.

Deleting an audience

mParticle deletes the downstream audience when you delete an audience from mParticle.

Supported identities

Following are the user identities and device identities that can be forwarded to Facebook. Identities that are hashed as SHA256 are noted.

• Facebook ID
• Email address (SHA256)
• Phone number (SHA256)
• Apple IDFA (SHA256)
• Google Advertising ID (SHA256)
• Android Device ID (SHA256)

Understanding your match rate

The “match rate” for a Facebook audience refers to the percentage of your forwarded user data that Facebook successfully matches to active Facebook users.

When you connect an mParticle audience with Facebook, several user identifiers are included for each audience member (such as email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs, or mobile advertiser IDs). After you send an audience from mParticle to Facebook, Facebook attempts to match these identifiers to user profiles on Facebook. The match rate indicates how successful Facebook is in finding corresponding user profiles for the identifiers you provided.

There are several factors that can impact your match rate:

• Data quality: more accurate, up-to-date, and complete user data leads to a higher match rate.
• Privacy settings: Facebook users with stricter privacy or data sharing settings may also impact your match rate.
• Identifiers used: certain identifiers, like email addresses and Facebook user IDs, have higher match rates due to their uniqueness.
• Audience size: larger audiences have higher match rates because of the increased chance in finding matches within the set of Facebook users. Facebook suggests a minimum audience size of 1,000 people for best results.

A higher match rate means that more of your user data was successfully matched to Facebook users, allowing you to reach a larger audience with your ads or other marketing efforts. However, it’s important to keep in mind that not all of your user data may match with Facebook users, and the match rate may vary from one audience to another.

Value-based audiences

You can use the mParticle audiences integration to create value-based lookalike audiences. These audiences target users who share similar characteristics and behaviors with your existing high-value customers.

However, unlike traditional lookalike audiences, which are based solely on demographic or interest similarities, value-based lookalike audiences are generated using an attribute that reflects the monetary value or profitability of your customers. For example, if you select a lifetime value attribute, Facebook will create a lookalike audience composed of users that have a higher lifetime value.

By default, mParticle only forwards users in a value-based audience to Facebook if the value of their “value reprepresenting attribute” is greater than 0. You can include values equaling zero by checking Allow Zero Values when creating your value-based audience.

You can learn more about value-based lookalike audiences in Facebook’s documentation.

Customer File Source Requirements

As of July 2, 2018, Facebook requires that all new audiences disclose whether their data was collected from customers directly, collected from partners, or both. You can provide this information in the connection settings when connecting an audience to Facebook via the Customer File Source setting.

You can learn more about the Customer File Source Requirement in Facebook’s documentation.

Data forwarding

Limits

Facebook does not allow more than 500 custom audiences to be created per Facebook Ads account. If you attempt to forward more than 500 audiences to Facebook, an error will be returned.

Upload frequency

The Facebook Audience integration uses bulk forwarding. This means that instead of forwarding audience data in real time, mParticle adds updates to a queue. By default, mParticle forwards data to Facebook from this queue whenever one of the following conditions is met:

• 3 hours have passed since the last update
• At least 75,000 messages are in the queue

Verify and troubleshoot your connection

Before activating your new connection, or when troubleshooting issues, please be aware of the following:

Are you forwarding audience data to the correct Facebook Ads account?

During steps 4-5 of the first stage of the setup process, you connect your Facebook account to mParticle. Make sure that you use a Facebook account that has been granted access to the Facebook Ads account you will forward your audiences to, and make sure that after connecting your Facebook account that you use the Facebook Account ID dropdown menu to select the Facebook Ads account.

It is possible to have access to multiple Ads accounts, so make sure that you selected the correct Ads account when creating your output.

Read Access to a Facebook Ads account for instructions on how to make sure your Facebook account has the correct access. If you do not have the correct access, reach out to your Facebook Ads account administrator.

If you are forwarding Facebook IDs, did you add the correct Facebook app ID?

If you are trying to forward Facebook IDs from mParticle to Facebook, you must provide your Facebook application ID.

Often referred to as an app ID, a Facebook Application ID is a unique ID assigned to your application when you register it on the Facebook Developers platform. This App ID is required to integrate your application with various Facebook functions, such as logging in through Facebook, accessing Facebook’s Graph API, or incorporating social plugins like the Like button.

See Access to your Facebook Application ID for instructions on how to find your application ID.

Data latency

While you may see your forwarded mParticle audiences listed in Facebook Ads right away, it can take up to 24 hours before your audience data begins to fully populate. This time can vary depending on how large your audiences are.

When looking for your audience data in Facebook, select the correct Business Portfolio

After logging into Facebook Ads Manager, make sure that you select the correct Business Portfolio from the left-hand navbar. You should select the Business Portfolio containing the Ads Account you chose to forward your audiences to.

Forwarding multi-key audiences to Facebook creates multiple audiences

When you select more than one user identity to forward to Facebook, a separate audience will be created in Facebook for each identity you select. If you want to have a single audience containing all of the identities you selected, make sure that you check Enable Multi-Key Audiences when connecting your audience to Facebook.

However, even with multi-key audiences enabled, you will still see an additional audience in Facebook for each identity selected.

Settings reference

Configuration Settings

Setting Name	Data Type	Default Value	Description
Facebook Account ID	string		This setting is your Facebook account id. You can find it in the Ads Powertool.
Facebook AccessToken	string		The Facebook access token used to make Graph API calls.

Connection Settings

Setting Name	Data Type	Default Value	Description
Forward Emails	bool	True	If enabled, and the user’s e-mail address is available, the SHA-256 hash of that e-mail address will be added to the audience ”<Audience Name> (email)“.
Forward Facebook IDs	bool	True	If enabled, the user’s Facebook ID is available, and the Facebook Application ID property is set, it will be added to the audience ”<Audience Name> (fb id)“.
Forward IDFAs	bool	True	If enabled, and the user’s IDFA is available, it will be added to the audience ”<Audience Name> (IDFA/GAID)“.
Forward Google Advertising IDs	bool	True	If enabled, and the user’s Google Advertising ID is available, it will be added to the audience ”<Audience Name> (IDFA/GAID)“.
Forward Phones	bool	True	If enabled, and the user’s phone number is available, it will be added to the audience ”<Audience Name> (phone)“.
Enable Multi-Key Audience	bool	False	If enabled, all selected identities will also be sent to a single audience for higher match rates.
Match on User Attributes	bool	False	If enabled, mParticle will send all possible user attribute values to Facebook for multi-key matching. See user identity matching for more details.
Facebook Application ID	string		The App ID found on your Facebook application’s dashboard.
Is Audience Value Based	bool	False	If enabled, the audiences created in Facebook will be value-based.
User Attribute Representing Value	string		The user attribute to be used as the basis for setting value in Facebook. Only non-negative numbers will be forwarded to Facebook. This setting only applies to value-based audiences.
Allow Zero Values	bool	False	If enabled, user data either missing the above user attribute, or having a user attribute value of zero, will be forwarded to Facebook. This setting only applies to value based audiences.
Customer File Source	enum	UNSELECTED	Indicates whether the information was collected directly from customers, provided by partners or a combination of the two. Starting July 2, 2018, Facebook requires this setting on all new audiences created.
External Email Identity Type	enum	Email	The mParticle User Identity type to forward as an External Email to Facebook.
Multi-Key External ID Type	enum	None	The user identity to be sent to Facebook as the external identity. Note: this identity’s value will have whitespace trimmed, be converted to lowercase, and be hashed prior to sending to Facebook.