Facebook Business Manager can be an intimidating and confusing place at times, even for the most seasoned marketers. 

It can be especially challenging for people who have never used it before but want to take advantage of leveraging their customer lists for targeting opportunities and don’t know where to start. 

We’ve got your back with a quick and easy explainer on how to upload a custom audience customer list into Facebook. 

Follow the steps below or check out the video and you’ll be well on your way to better Facebook audiences in 5 minutes:

1.  Gather all of your website purchasers, subscribers, and other relevant data into a spreadsheet. This is the part that could take longer than 5 minutes. But if you’re using a CMS like Shopify, you should be able to export this list quickly and easily.
2. Next, format it so the columns go as follows: customer first name, customer last name, email, phone number, city, state/province, postal code, country, and value. For value, we typically recommend a customer’s lifetime value. For example, if a customer tends to spend a lot of money on your product, they would have a higher lifetime value. If you don’t have lifetime value, you are still able to upload the customer list without that information. 
3. Save spreadsheet as a .CSV file. 
4. Name the file clearly, for example “CRM | Website Purchasers | Date of Most Recent Data.”
5. Open up Facebook Business Manager and click on the 3 little lines in the top left corner next to Facebook Home (the 3 little lines are often called the website’s hamburger): 
6. To the right, a side bar will pop up titled “All Tools.” Click on audiences. 
7. Once the audiences page loads, click on the “create audiences” button. A dropdown menu will appear, select “custom audience.” 
8. A variety of options will appear in the pop up window. Select customer list. 
9. Under customer list, you can select among 3 options: use a file that includes customer lifetime value (LTV), use a file that doesn’t include LTV, or import from Mailchimp. Depending on step 2 and whether or not you include the customer lifetime value, select the first or second option. 
10. Under Upload Your List, drag and drop the file, or click the upload button and add it from there. 
11. Once uploaded, the name should auto populate properly, but if not make sure to fix it so you can distinguish this new audience from previous audiences. 
12. Click next, and Facebook will ask you to choose your customer value column. Select the column that includes that data from the dropdown menu, it should be labeled as “value” in your spreadsheet. Note: do not use symbols such as the dollar sign in this column, just use numbers to designate the value. 
13. Double check that all columns have been properly formatted and identified, that first name corresponds with first name, last name with last name, city with city, etc. You can change any columns that weren’t identified under the dropdown menu next to each column. 
14. Then click upload and create in the bottom right corner. It will take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour before the customer list is ready to be used in a campaign. 

And that’s it!

Now you have a highly valuable custom audience that you can do almost anything with in your Facebook Ads campaign. Target the audience directly, test lookalikes based on it, layer it onto broad audiences and much more. 

Need help strategizing around Facebook custom audience implementation? Contact us today to schedule a discovery call and we’ll give you our honest assessment of how we can help.