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
| Column Title | Column Title |
| **Pros** | The audience can be updated anytime via API without the need for visitors to visit the webpage again. |
| **Cons** | Customers are not matched if emails and phones tracked in Bloomreach Engagement are not the same used in their Facebook accounts. |
**B. Placing Facebook pixel on the website via Bloomreach Engagement Tag Manager** and enriching the cookie data with Bloomreach Engagement segmentations or recommended products
| Column Title | Column Title |
| **Pros** | No need to match emails or phone numbers, meaning 100% match rate. Possibility to use dynamic product ads. |
| **Cons** | Cookie information is updated only at the moment of the webpage visit. Since cookies expire, you might be able to retarget only recent customers with this approach. |
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
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
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.
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.
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.
| Customer ID | Description |
| It has to be an email that a customer has used with his Facebook account. It is hashed (converts one value to another) before transferring to Facebook. | |
| Phone | The customers’ phone numbers must be in the international format [E.164](🔗). All characters except numbers will be removed before sending to Facebook, leading zeroes, and the \"+\" sign is also removed. It is hashed before transferring to Facebook. Note: always include the country code (for example, +44) as part of your customers' phone numbers, even if they are from the same country where your organization is based. |
| Mobile Advertiser ID | A unique identifier of a customer’s mobile device. This can be either Apple’s Advertising Identifier (IDFA) or Android Advertising ID. You can track these IDs using your own mobile app. |
Deprecation of Facebook ID
Facebook’s App Scope User ID was discontinued by the network.
Deprecation of External ID
`
External ID` has been deprecated as a customer matching option in Engagement.
Email Hashing
Bloomreach Engagement carries out the hashing when sending the data to Facebook according to the SHA256 hash.
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.
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
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.
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 <nonscript> part)
## Step 2: Track an event for a custom segment via Tag Manager
a. Add the following snippet as a separate tag
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
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.