There are two possible ways of integrating Bloomreach Engagement with Facebook Ads. This article will guide you through both options.

Watch this short introductory video about this feature:

A. Using Bloomreach Engagement built-in integration to create a custom audience list on Facebook based on matching customers' email addresses or phone numbers tracked in Bloomreach Engagement

B. Placing Facebook pixel on the website via Bloomreach Engagement Tag Manager and enriching the cookie data with Bloomreach Engagement segmentations or recommended products

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Tips & Tricks

Refer to our documentation to learn more about:

• Why you should run ads with Bloomreach Engagement
• How you can combine Ad Audiences with AI Predictions
• Relevant Use Cases for your business
• Best Practices for Ad Audience Management

Using built-in Facebook integration

We recommend using built-in Facebook integration for:

• Creating custom or sophisticated audiences for lookalike targeting
• Retargeting customers who might not have visited your website for a while

Step 1: Set up Facebook integration in Bloomreach Engagement

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You need a Facebook Business Manager account to enable this integration.

• a. In Bloomreach Engagement, go to Data & Assets > Integrations

• b. Click on Add new integration

• c. Choose Facebook Ads

• d. Click on Connect your Facebook account with Bloomreach Engagement

• e. Authenticate with your Facebook Business Manager account

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Once you authenticate your Facebook account, the integration will require permission to access any Facebook Advertising Account linked to your profile.
We recommend creating and using a dedicated Facebook user with permissions restricted to just one advertising account in order to prevent uploading audience data to the wrong advertising account.

• f. Save integration

Step 2: Set up Facebook retargeting nodes in Bloomreach Engagement scenarios

• a. Create business logic for assigning customers to various Facebook audiences using the Bloomreach Engagement scenario editor

• b. To assign a customer to a specific Facebook audience, add the retargeting node, double-click on it and select Facebook Ads

• c. Select the integration that you’ve created in Step 1

• d. Select an audience from the list to add to / remove from or create a new one.

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Audience size in Meta

When using multiple identifiers (e.g., email & phone), the estimated audience size in the Meta (Facebook) will not be available. This does not have any effect on the possibility of using the audience for targeting.

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When you create an audience in the retargeting node, it will be available in Facebook Manager immediately before the scenario has started for the first time.

Furthermore, you can enrich the information Facebook receives about your audience based on the Value Based Audiences function that allows FB to calculate lookalike audiences (those with similar characteristics) by providing a specific metric (value) to each customer sent into retargeting nodes. This value is usually connected to Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) or total revenue for a given customer. In other words, it impacts the Conversion rate % and Facebook Return On Investment (evaluate investment efficiency).

• e. Click on "Advanced settings: Customer matching" to configure which Bloomreach Engagement attributes will be used to match the customers. You can use the customer's Email, Phone, Facebook ID and Mobile advertiser ID.

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Deprecation of Facebook ID

Facebook’s App Scope User ID was discontinued by the network.

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Deprecation of External ID

External ID has been deprecated as a customer matching option in Engagement.

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Email Hashing

Bloomreach Engagement carries out the hashing when sending the data to Facebook according to the SHA256 hash.

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Events Tracking

Retargeting nodes track campaign events automatically. This enables simple evaluations of retargeting scenarios that contribute to the single customer view of a customer.

Remove customers from a FB audience

In step 2 d) above, select the action to perform - "Remove from the audience".

If the customer asks for the removal of all his data, there is an option in Facebook retargeting node to remove a customer from ALL Facebook Ads audiences.

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Audience size

Removing users from audiences with less than 100 users will result in an error 'Insufficient permissions for integration to work properly.' Due to a restriction on Meta (Facebook) side, you cannot remove users from this audience because you will get a low audience size.

Custom Audiences must have a certain minimum size, approximately 100 unique users. If you need to remove users and you are going under this limit, it is recommended to delete the custom audience entirely.

Consent policy

Consent policy settings are part of the retargeting node, which simplifies the design of the retargeting scenarios and ensures that only people with proper consent will be pushed to Google/Facebook Ads audiences.

Step 3: Check the received audience in your Facebook account

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When the matched number of customers is high, it might take a few hours before you see the segment being populated on Facebook. You might see a message “Low match, populating”. This is OK, it will populate eventually.

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Retention period

Please note that Facebook Ads integration does not send retention_days of 180 days when creating an audience. It defaults to forever.

However, this applies only to the audiences created directly from Bloomreach via the integration. If the audiences already existed, for example, by being manually created in Meta (and updated via Bloomreach), they might have other durations. This is because they are specified during the creation process of the audiences.

Using the FB pixel via Bloomreach Engagement Tag Manager

We recommend using Facebook Pixel with Bloomreach Engagement Tag Manager for:

• Creating custom or sophisticated audiences for retargeting

Step 1: Set up Main Facebook Pixel in Bloomreach Engagement Tag Manager

a. In Bloomreach Engagement, go to Data & Assets > Tag Manager
b. Create a new Custom HTML tag
c. Copy and paste the Facebook Pixel code from your Facebook Ads account. The Pixel ID needs to be replaced in two places (in the <script> part and in the part)

<!-- Facebook Pixel Code -->
<script>
  !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
  {if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
  n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
  if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';
  n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
  t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
  s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script',
  'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js');
  fbq('init', 'your-pixel-id-goes-here');
  fbq('track', 'PageView');
</script>
<noscript>
  <img height="1" width="1" style="display:none"    src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=your-pixel-id-goes-here&ev=PageView&noscript=1"/>
</noscript>
<!-- End Facebook Pixel Code -->

Step 2: Track an event for a custom segment via Tag Manager

a. Add the following snippet as a separate tag

<script>
{% set score_segment = segmentations['YOUR-SEGMENTATION-ID-HERE'] | string  %}
  fbq('trackCustom', 'addToSegment', {
    segment_name: '{{ score_segment | string }}'
  });
</script>

b. Make sure that the custom tag you set up has lower priority than the Main Facebook Pixel

c. Check your new event on your Facebook Ads account

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Facebook Ads tool uses a different attribution model from Bloomreach Engagement, and thus your Facebook advertising data may not match up with Bloomreach Engagement data.