6 ways to automate Facebook custom audiences with Zapier

Getting your ads in front of the right people is harder than it sounds. You don't just need reach—you need precision. If you're targeting the wrong audience, you're wasting money and missing out on potential customers.

That's where Facebook custom audiences comes in. This tool lets you target people who already know your brand—like past website visitors, existing customers, or engaged followers—or find new audiences with similar interests and behaviors.

By combining Facebook custom audiences with automation, you can keep your audience lists updated in real time, ensuring your ads are always targeting the right people with the right message. Here's how to make it happen.

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• Add email subscribers to your custom audience

• Add leads and customers to a custom audience

• Build custom audiences from product purchases

• Build custom audiences from a spreadsheet

• Add new CRM contacts to a custom audience

• Add users to a custom audience from a webhook

The 4 types of custom audiences in Facebook

Not all custom audiences are created equal. Depending on your offering and industry, you might choose to create different types of audiences—or even different audiences for different types of ads. There are four common ways to build these targeted lists.

1. Custom audiences from customer lists

If you collect email addresses, such as when someone subscribes to your newsletter or makes a purchase, you can upload that information to Facebook and target them with ads on the platform. When you upload your email list, Facebook uses "hashing" to match the email addresses with user profiles while keeping specific customer data private.

Keep in mind that you can only upload data from customers who have permitted you to market to them. For example, you can't use an email list you've purchased or data you've gathered from other websites. Also, if someone opts out of your email list, you need to remove them from your custom audience, too. 

Most countries have restrictions around how you collect, store, and share audience data, so you should double-check your region's regulations before you delve into email marketing and Facebook ads.

2. Custom audiences from your website

You can also target website viewers on Facebook if you install the Meta pixel (previously called the Facebook Pixel) on your website. The pixel is a small piece of code that measures customer actions so you can build custom audiences. Then Facebook can match your website visitors to their Facebook profiles. 

You can then use this information to create custom audiences that include all your website visitors or generate smaller groups targeting people who have visited a specific product page or product category. For example, you might target customers who have looked at your shoe category with ads of different types of shoes. 

3. Custom audiences from engagement

An engagement custom audience is a group of users who have interacted with your brand on other Meta platforms, such as Instagram or Facebook. For example, different engagement types include watching a video on your page, filling out a lead form, visiting your Facebook Page or Instagram business profile, or registering for an event. 

By targeting those users, Facebook allows you to nurture customers who are already aware of your brand and more likely to convert. 

4. Custom audiences from app activity

The fourth type of custom audience on Facebook is related to app activity. If you have an app for your business, you can pass data to Meta (aka Facebook) about those users.

For example, you might create an ad on Facebook to remind users who've downloaded your app to sign in, view a sale, or upload a review. Note, the targeting options for this type of custom audience can be limited based on your location and the age of your target audience. Children or audiences living in Europe may have limited reach based on new privacy rules. 

You can also target your existing customers with a custom audience. Learn how to use your customer list to create custom audiences on Facebook.

Why you should use automation to build your custom audiences in Facebook

It's no secret that marketing to existing customers and followers can produce much higher conversion rates than trying to reach people who have never bought from you or haven't even heard of your brand. 

It's also more cost-effective—it can cost five times more to attract a new customer than retain an existing one.

However, manually creating custom audiences from spreadsheets and forms can be a time-consuming chore. With a Zap—our word for Zapier's automated workflows—you can cut out the manual work and sync your data with Facebook custom audiences automatically. That way, your ads will always target your most recent subscribers and customers, and nobody falls through the cracks.

Add email subscribers to your custom audience

If you use email platforms like MailChimp or ActiveCampaign to keep in touch with customers, you can create a Zap to automatically add new subscribers to a custom audience.

You can also create a custom audience if a new customer is tagged in ConvertKit. For example, if you have two or more different subscriber lists, you can add newly tagged subscribers to a specific Facebook custom audience. 

Add leads and customers to a custom audience

No matter how you collect contacts—from form tools to ad platforms and beyond—you'll want an easy way to route their email addresses to a custom audience on Facebook. 

For example, if you asked customers to fill out a form providing feedback about a new product launch, you could later target those emails on Facebook when you launch. Or you could send targeted campaigns to leads who want to know more about your product, promoting any exclusive deals.

These Zap templates will help you add them directly to your audience list the moment anyone fills out a form in tools like Typeform or LinkedIn Ads. 

Alternatively, if you're launching new campaigns in tools like Google Ads, you can use this Zap to create custom audiences from scratch in Facebook. That way, you can automatically refine your targeting strategies and completely eliminate the need to manually transfer audience details between tools. 

Build custom audiences from product purchases

If you create a custom audience from a Shopify, Kajabi, or WooCommerce customer list, you can target past customers with Facebook ads. 

For example, you could create campaigns with special offers for repeat clients or let people know when you release a new version of a product they already own by adding new customers to a Facebook custom audience.

Build custom audiences from a spreadsheet

If you're using Google Sheets or Excel to collect audience data, such as with a Google Form, you can use Zapier to connect your spreadsheet to an audience in Facebook. 

Here are a few Zaps that will automatically add email addresses from your spreadsheet to a Facebook custom audience.

Add new CRM contacts to a custom audience

Do you use a CRM like Salesforce to keep track of leads and customers? With these Zaps, you can automatically add existing leads or contacts to your custom audience. 

Add users to a custom audience from a webhook

Zapier connects with thousands of apps. But if the specific app you want to use isn't on Zapier or you want to customize your Zap outside of an integration's available triggers and actions, you can use webhooks to pull in additional data to Facebook custom audiences. 

This Zap will add an email address straight to Facebook whenever a new webhook is received at a specified URL:

Drive Facebook ad conversions with targeted custom audiences 

Facebook custom audiences lets you create laser-focused remarketing ads for a wide variety of custom segments, from leads to customers and even website visitors. You can use these audiences to remind people about products they're interested in or recover abandoned shopping carts. 

Creating custom audiences in Facebook is a powerful way to boost your marketing efforts, but don't let the chore of creating audiences from scratch hold you back from giving it a try. Add Zapier to the mix, and you can streamline the process by automatically sending customer data from the other apps in your toolkit to Facebook so you can reach the people most important to you.

This article was originally published in January 2021, written by Jasmine Williams with previous updates by Nicole Antosz. It was most recently updated in December 2024 by Elena Alston.