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I’ve had lots of people ask me how to actually set up syncing your ConvertKit segments with Facebook Custom Audiences. Please note you need the ConvertKit Creator Pro plan to use this feature.
1. Set up the initial integration between ConvertKit and Facebook
👉 ConvertKit have a great help article about that here.
2. Create an Offline Event in Facebook
In your Ads Manager, under Events Manager, you want to select ‘Connect data sources’:
Next, select ‘Offline’:
Give this new ‘data source’ a name:
And lastly, you’ll be presented with different options about which Facebook ad accounts this new ‘data source’ is linked to. If you’ve just got one account, I’d probably just select everything here.
3. Create a new Audience in Facebook
In your Ads Manager, under Audiences, you want to Create Audience → Custom Audience → Offline Activity
Select the offline ‘data source’ you just created in Step 2. Then select the maximum number of days (180 days at the time of writing), and give the Audience a sensible name. Then save/create the Audience.
4. Set up the segment in ConvertKit
Create a new segment in ConvertKit. Give it a sensible name and filter for the subscribers you want to be included in the Custom Audience. (In this example it’s for my full list, hence ‘All Subscribers’).
Immediately below the subscriber filters, you’ll see the option to select the Custom Audience you just created in Facebook.
As soon as you select the Facebook Custom Audience, it will then look like this:
That’s it! You can now go ahead and save the segment.
When you click back into the segment you’ll see the Custom Audience is still saved.
When you look at your Facebook Audiences, initially you’ll see the Custom Audience is ‘Pending’:
But it will eventually change to showing the approximate number of people in the Custom Audience. Note that only a percentage of your ConvertKit email subscribers will be in the segment as many people use different email addresses for Facebook.
I hope this has been helpful! If you’d like to learn more about Facebook Ads, I highly recommend Social Lab’s Amplify membership.
Hi Lizzy and thank you for this helpful post!
I followed the procedure, but when I click back into the segment I don’t see the Custom Audience is still saved. Why?
I created an offline event (under offline activity) in facebook, and I assigned it to 5 different custom audiences synced with 5 convertkit segments. Is it right to use the same offline event for all the 5 custom audiences or I have to create a unique offline event for every custom audience?
I’m not sure what you mean when you say you created an offline event? You want to create a Custom Audience with the source of ‘Offline Activity’. You then select that Custom Audience in the segment in ConvertKit.
You don’t select anything inside Facebook, you just create the Custom Audience.
I didn’t have any default event in the source “offline activity”, so facebook doesn’t allow me to save the custom audience.
Let me explain better… In this post you show the steps to create a new custom audience in facebook. In the image 1, where there is “Default Offline Activities Set for Elizabeth Goddard” I cannot chose anything, because I’ve never set an offline event before.
So I’ve tried to create a new offline event (never done before), and now I can create a custom audience with the source “Offline Activity” and sync it with my convertkit segments. But I’m sure there’s something wrong, because when I come into the segment, the custom audience isn’t saved.
I’ve just updated the tutorial and added in a whole new Step 2. I didn’t realise that having an offline data source was something I must have set up before. It looks like you already figured this part out though?
Hmmm, with the saving, that’s strange… it just goes back to nothing selected when you click into the segment again?
Hi Lizzy,
I followed your instructons and connected everything properly on both ends, however when i run ad campaigns on fb using these custom audiences they wont work nor receive any dynamic update or information from convertkit.
Infact, if i check the Custom Audience status in the Audience Manager page, it shows not last update of received data, despite being correclty connected within the segment in convertkit
Hi Nick!
Hmm, when did you set it all up? It can take a few hours/days to start showing that it’s working properly…