Facebook Ads
This page describes how to use Census with Facebook Ads (Audiences and Conversions).
In this guide, we will show you how to connect Facebook Ads to Census and create your first sync.
- Have your Facebook Ads account ready.
- Have the proper credentials to access to your data source. See our docs for each supported data source for further information:
The first step is finding the audience you'd like to sync data into. You can do that by visiting the Audiences section of Facebook's Ads Manager. Make a note of the ID (name will work too) of the audience you want to sync to from Census.
If you'd like to use a new Facebook Audience with Census, go ahead and create it now. Facebook Audiences makes it a bit confusing to create a new empty audience for Census. You'll need to create a new Customer List Custom Audience and then upload a CSV with the columns that you'll be using.
The results of the View, Table, or Census Model should contain a row per user. Each row will have three or more columns:
- 1.A unique identifier for the user, Facebook calls this the External ID. This is usually a unique ID from your application database, but could be email as well if that also uniquely identifies each row.
- 2.A column indicating what Facebook Audience the user should be synced to (can be the audience name or audience ID).
- 3.Any other identifying fields that Facebook can use to match your audience. Facebook requires these fields to be formatted in a certain way. For example, email must be lower-case. You can read more about each of the formatting requirements in the Facebook Documentation.
Example Facebook Audience Model:
SELECT
user_id,
LOWER(email_address) AS email,
'active users audience' AS fb_audience
FROM user_activity_table;
Now that your data is prepared and in the correct format, we're ready to start syncing users to Facebook.
Update or Create will add or update users to the audience, but will never remove users. Mirror will also remove users that have disappeared from the source. Note: If you're reusing an existing Facebook Audience, Census will not remove any users already added to that audience through other means. Census only removes users that it created initially.
This should be the user id or other external ID you selected when you created the model.
Let Census know which column should be used to assign users to their audience. Select the Audience's ID or Name to correspond to the type of identifier you're providing with your model.
You can then map any user identifying fields that are present in your source data (e.g. phone number, email, first name, last name, etc).
Send web events directly to Facebook from your warehouse, exactly as if they were pixel events using the Facebook Conversions API.
To view all your Facebook Ads accounts' Pixel IDs go to the Events Manager: https://business.facebook.com/events_manager2/list/.
Be sure to select the specific ads account you want to work on. You can switch ad accounts in the navigation bar on the left side of the screen.
In the events manager, you can view all your ad account's pixels and existing events. If a custom event doesn't exist already, Census will create it for you.
In your SQL model, dbt model, or table -- ensure that you have all required fields for your conversion sync, and any user identifiers so that Facebook can perform ad attribution. Facebook Conversion syncs require the following fields:
Census requires the model to have a column that stores a unique identifier for each row so that Census never sends any duplicate records. We'll call this unique identifier column "Event ID". If you have an identifier that you are already passing via your pixel on the website for online versions of this conversion event, use this identifier. Some common examples include
user_id, lead_id, and order_id.The Facebook Conversions API requires 4 fields for every event:
- Pixel ID - see above to find.
- Action Source - This field allows you to specify where your conversions occurred. It accepts one of the following values: "email", "website", "phone_call", "chat", "physical_store", "system_generated", and "other".
- Event Time - can be up to 7 days before you send an event to Facebook. This date must be sent in GMT timezone.
Facebook attributes conversions back to ad campaigns by identifying the users that saw or interacted with ad content. To do so, they accept the following user identifiers and will attempt to match each conversion to a facebook user. Sending more identifiers will improve match rates.
For a more complete description of each identifier, please see Facebook's API documentation. When Facebook requires a field's value to be hashed, you may choose to use a pre-hashed value (if you have one), or for Census to perform the hashing for you.
- Email
- Phone
- Gender
- Date of Birth
- Last Name
- First Name
- City
- State
- Zip
- Country
- External ID
- Client IP address
- Client user agent
- Click ID
- Browser ID
- Subscription ID
- Facebook Login ID
- Lead ID
Your final sync configuration will look like the following!
event_id | pixel_id | action_source | timestamp | event_name | email | other customer information parameters |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1234 | 1000294785 | website | 2022-01-01 00:00:00+000 | sample_event |
Object Name | Supported? | Identifiers |
Customer | ✅ | |
✅ | Any unique ID | |
Product Catalog | 🔜 | |
Census supports custom fields on Conversions, simply Create New Field when creating a Conversions sync.
Facebook Audiences and Conversions are a bit unique from other services. We do not upload the data you provide directly. Instead, it's "matched" to Facebook's audience. To do this, both sides "hash" their data so users can be compared without revealing the actual personally identifiable information.
Census automatically takes care of this hashing step for you.
However, all values provided to Census must be lowercase. You can use this standard SQL function
LOWER()that works across all data warehouses.Additionally, there is specific behavior for certain fields in Facebook, check out this link to their docs, but you also need to remove white spaces on certain Customer Information parameters. For example:
- City changing from 'San Antonio' => 'sanantonio' using
replace( ,' ','') - Date of birth changing from '1983-12-24' => '19831224' using
replace( ,'-','')
Behaviors | Supported? | Objects |
Update or Create | ✅ | Audiences |
Mirror | ✅ | Audiences |
Append | ✅ | Conversions |
Update or Create will add or update users to the audience, but will never remove users. Mirror will also remove users that have been removed from the source.
Note: If you're reusing an existing Facebook Audience, Census will not remove any users already added to that audience through other means. Census only removes users that it created initially.
Sometimes error messages can be a little cryptic. Here's some Facebook errors that pop up on occasion and what they mean.
Custom Audience terms have not been accepted: Accept the Custom Audience terms at [url] to create or edit an audience with an uploaded customer list.
In order to get around this error, the user that does the authentication to Census should be the same user that accepts the policy updates. For example, you may have a "Business" account on Facebook, but to authenticate to Census you might use personal Facebook accounts that are "attached" to the business account. The corresponding personal account would need to accept the policy.
If you are unsure if your team has already accepted the terms and conditions, you can make a GET call to see if your account has signed the terms and conditions.
The API call is:
GET act_<AD_ACCOUNT_ID>?fields=tos_accepted
A sample response would be something like this: {
"tos_accepted": {
"custom_audience_tos": 1 // this means the terms were signed
},
"id": "act_<AD_ACCOUNT>"
}
Last modified 1mo ago