Custom Audiences: The Key to Getting B2B Advertising Right on Facebook

As most digital marketers know, you can build custom audiences within Facebook’s advertising platform, matched audiences within LinkedIn, and customer lists within Google Ads.

Custom audiences are created from lists of your existing contacts/prospects or targeted lists purchased for marketing functions.

Custom audiences are extremely valuable for running remarketing campaigns, segmenting current prospects and reaching them with different messaging or creative based on where they are in the funnel, or executing account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns.

How do custom list-based audiences actually work? Matching

For example, when you upload a file with list-based audiences to Facebook, Facebook matches the data points you provide against their user base.

Facebook uses, what they call, “Advanced Matching”, to match users. They allow you to use the following data attributes for custom audiences:

• Email Address
• Phone Number
• First Name
• Last Name
• City
• State/Province
• Country
• Date of Birth
• Gender
• Mobile Advertiser ID
• Facebook App User ID

Google and LinkedIn use similar data points for matching. All advertising platforms follow this same approach.

The question is: What data do you have on your customers or prospects?

Most B2B companies have a name, business email address, and office phone number (sometimes more, sometimes less).

If your leads and contacts created their Facebook, LinkedIn or Google profiles using a personal, non-professional, email address, the chance of being able to match them is quite low.

• Facebook: 10–20%
• Google: 10–20%
• LinkedIn: 50%

So how do you get a high match rate if you only have B2B contact info?

Enrich your leads with ad network matching data

Enrichment adds additional data attributes associated with a specific record in a file. By appending additional data points to your list, you’re improving the chance that Facebook can match these custom audiences to Facebook users. The more data attributes you can add, the better your match rates will be.

We can’t rely on our prospects providing us the same exact email address that they use to log in to Facebook when they fill out our online forms, give us contact information at an event, or speak to our sales team. This is why enrichment and ad network data appending is so valuable for B2B marketers.

It’s most common for a B2B prospect to provide a business email address, which then makes it extremely difficult for Facebook to match them since most individuals do not use their business email address to log in to their social media accounts.

How to append ad network matching data

Hmm, maybe check out Primer?

Primer works with compliant data providers (over 7 of them) to enrich lists and append ad network matching data — identifiers like personal email, mobile phone, mobile advertiser ID, etc. Primer then syncs the custom audiences into your attached ad accounts and voila: you’re ready to run ad campaigns.

What is Primer’s match rate?

There is no way to predict the match rate until the data points are appended.

Primer’s enrichment rate with ad network matching data is ~70–80%. We see correspondingly similar match rates in Facebook and LinkedIn. Google is a bit lower (we’re working on that).

Given the way Facebook, Google and LinkedIn work, enriching your list with ad network matching data makes an enormous difference in match rate.

To get started, simply import a list of customers or prospects from the dashboard, enrich them with ad network matching data and sync them over to your attached ad accounts. Primer only charges for leads successfully enriched.

‍If you’re interested, you can read more on Facebook match rate here.