Seamlessly sync Cordial customer segments to Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook is still one of the major platforms to advertise on, especially with its wide range of targeting capabilities and placements. But even Facebook knows that their targeting doesn’t compare to the first-party data you have about your customers. This is why Facebook offers Custom Audiences as a targeting option, which can be created based on customer information, such as email address. Facebook uses the information to find a matching Facebook profile. If a match is found, you’ve unlocked the ability to display ads directly to your customers. With Cordial, marketers can create Custom Audiences on Facebook with the same rules and rulesets used to create audiences for email.

For example, create audiences in Cordial based on a combination of data sources, such as:

• Website data: browsed products, last purchase date, items in cart 
• Business data: product inventory, products on sale, store locations
• Customer data: demographics, in-store purchases, total lifetime value

And by simply combining a few of the above data sources, you can create hyper-targeted audience segments to advertise to on Facebook, such as:

• Lapsed high-LTV customers: customers with no purchases or website visits in the last 30 days but total lifetime value is greater than $500
• Abandon cart site visitors: customers who have items in the cart and didn’t finish the checkout process
• Brick-and-mortar shoppers: customers within 30 miles of a retail location and at least one in-store purchase

Another great advertising tool is Lookalike Audiences, which are created based on a Custom Audience you provide to Facebook. Facebook uses their algorithm to identify the common qualities between your custom audience and other Facebook users. This is a powerful tool to generate new customers.

Now that we’ve covered the power of Facebook custom audiences built from Cordial data, let’s dive deeper into the technical functionality of the API integration. 

Audience creation in Cordial

First, an audience rule must be set up to query any of the above mentioned data sources. All audience rules in Cordial are queried in real-time to ensure the data is up to date. This means you never need to worry about manually refreshing or pulling a list. The Cordial data platform takes care of that for you.

Deciding on sync timelines

After you have created the custom audience that you would like to sync to Facebook, you’ll need to select the sync durations. Different audience segments could require different sync times. For example, if your audience segment is site visitors within the past week, we’d recommend a daily sync in order to have all the users from the past seven trailing days.

Seamless adding and removing contacts

The Facebook API is robust and has many different options to choose from, but the Custom Audience API has some limitations. The two options are to either add users or remove users from an audience. There isn’t an option to lookup if a contact is already a member of the Custom Audience, so you cannot view the users inside the audience on demand.

To account for this limitation, the Cordial platform keeps track of the contacts that have synced in the last cycle and is able to compare those contacts to the ones that need to be synced in the next cycle.

Here’s a quick workflow example:

1. At the time of the first sync, the audience segment in Cordial contains four contacts: Daniel, Sherry, John, and Jane.
2. The integration passes the contacts through an API call which hashes the contact’s information for security.
3. Cordial keeps a record of the above contacts for later reference.
4. On the next sync, the audience segment in Cordial has updated to three contacts: Daniel, Sherry, and Adam.
5. The Cordial platform compares the contacts sent in the first sync to the contacts for the second sync to determine which contacts to add and which contacts to remove. In this example, John and Jane would be removed and Adam would be added.
6. After the above is completed, Cordial updates the users’ reference for the next sync.

For more information on setting up the Facebook Custom Audience Integration within Cordial, check out our knowledge base. And if you’d like to learn more about how Cordial can help you use all of your first-party data to build more robust audience segments, get in touch with a Cordial expert today.