Custom Audiences from your website is a targeting option that matches people who visit your website with people on Facebook, using the Facebook pixel. You can then create an ad to show to that audience.

You can create a Custom Audience from your website for any group of visitors that you'd like to reach with targeted Facebook ads. For example, you can run a campaign to reach people who visited a product page but didn't complete a purchase to encourage them to go back to the website to do so. Or, you can create an audience of everyone who's visited your website in the past 30 days.

Learn how to create a Custom Audience from your website.

The Facebook pixel is a piece of JavaScript code for your website that enables you to measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaigns. Using the Facebook pixel, you can leverage the actions people take on your website across devices to inform more effective Facebook advertising campaigns. With the Facebook pixel, you can:

• Measure cross-device conversions: See how your customers are moving between devices before they convert.
• Optimize delivery to people likely to take action: Ensure your ads are being seen by people most likely to take the action you want them to take, like purchase or fill out a form.
• Automatically build audiences for website visitors to retarget: Create Custom Audiences for people who take specific actions on your website, like visited a product page, added to cart or purchased a product.
• Create Lookalike Audiences. Find more people who similar to your best customers.
• Run dynamic product ads. Create relevant and timely ads on Facebook based on the products people have visited on your website.
• Access Audience Insights. Get rich insights about the people who visit your website.

Learn how to create your Facebook pixel.

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To create a Custom Audience from your website:

1. Go to your Audience tab in Ads Manager.
2. Click Tools and then choose Audiences.
3. Click Create Audience in the top left.
4. Select Custom Audience.
5. Click Website Traffic.
6. Set your parameters, give your Custom Audience a name and click Create Audience.

You can find more conversions, improve optimization and remarket to more people on Facebook by enabling the advanced matching feature of the pixel. To do so, you need to modify your pixel code to capture the hashed customer data (ex: email addresses or phone numbers) you collect from your website during processes like check-out, account sign-in or registration. We can then use these hashed identifiers to match people visiting your website with people on Facebook, which can lead to more conversions for your Facebook campaigns and larger size of your website custom audiences.

To learn how to implement the necessary changes to your pixel code to take advantage of this feature, visit our developer site.

Learn how to format your data to ensure you're getting the highest match rate possible.

After you've installed the Facebook pixel on your website, navigate to a web page the pixel was placed on. If it's working, the pixel will send information back to Facebook and you'll be able to see activity in the Facebook Pixel page in your Ads Manager. Your pixel's status will also be set to Active.

The main graph on the Facebook pixel page shows total pixel traffic over time (the default view for all data on the dashboard is the past 7 days, but you can adjust it using the dropdown on the top right).

At a glance, you can tell whether the data is roughly where you would expect it to be. Does it generally match your website analytics reporting? To check, compare the Total Traffic number in the upper right-hand side with the total number of website visits in the past 7 days (as reported in your website analytics).

Keep in mind data on this page refers to the total number of pixel fires, regardless of whether they were associated with an ad. This means the total number should roughly align with your overall website/page visit volume, not just attributed traffic from Facebook. It's normal that Facebook's numbers may be different from a third party’s, but if there's a very large discrepancy (or you don’t see any pixel traffic), something may be wrong.

After you've checked your total pixel fires, you should ensure your events are being reported correctly. If you have events on any of your web pages, you should see them in your Events tab below your traffic graph. Both Standard and Custom Events will show up on this tab. If you have the wrong Event enabled, or it’s set up on the wrong page, this will help you find it.

Events are case sensitive, so if you accidentally added fbq('track', 'viewcontent'); to one of your web pages instead of the correct standard event code fbq('track', 'ViewContent'); you'll see an event called viewcontent show up in the events tab instead (which will render as a custom event rather than a standard event), so you'll want to edit your pixel code on that page again to replace that code with the correct standard event code. Please note that PageView is the default event that the pixel fires on every page of your website (it's not a standard event).

Troubleshooting Pixel and Event Implementation

We recommend downloading the Facebook Pixel Helper to troubleshoot implementation problems. Keep in mind you have to be using the Chrome browser for it to work. Once the Pixel Helper is installed, a small icon will appear next to your address bar. Navigate to your website in your Chrome browser and click the Pixel Helper icon.

The pop-up will tell what pixels/events were found on the page, and whether they have loaded successfully. If you added standard events to your pixel code on certain pages, you'll need to complete a test conversion for each (ex. add an item to your cart to test an “AddToCart” event) in order to confirm that each event loads on the desired page or action. If your pixel's PageView event loads on every web page, and each of your standard events load successfully (on the desired pages only), you're ready to attach the Facebook pixel to your ads.

If the Pixel Helper tool displays errors or warnings on any of your pages, click Learn More to help resolve the issue. For a full list of possible Pixel Helper tool errors, warnings and recommendations, see our developers site.

In order to resolve most Pixel Helper errors you'll need to check the HTML code on the web page where you received the error. To check the HTML code, go to the desired web page and right-click on the screen, then select “Inspect” and search for your pixel ID (you can usually use “Control + F” or “Command + F” to bring up your browser's search bar).

• If you don't find the pixel ID anywhere in the code, it may have not been placed on that page. If you installed the pixel using a tag manager then you won't see the code on the actual web page, so you'll have to troubleshoot within your tag manager.
• If you do find the pixel ID, check the code carefully against your code in your pixel dashboard (under Actions > View Pixel Code) to make sure everything between the <script> and </script> tags is exactly the same and that the pixel wasn't placed in the middle of another code block on your web page. You should find 2 instances of your pixel ID on each page where you placed the pixel (one in the <script> portion of the code and one in the <no script> portion. If you find more than 2, it's likely that the code has been placed multiple times, so you can delete any additional instances.
• When troubleshooting standard event implementation, make sure the the event code (ex. fbq('track', 'Purchase', {value: '0.00', currency:'USD'}); for a Purchase event) is placed either:

  1. Directly between the “;” after the PageView event and the </script> tag, or;
  2. Directly below the entire base code (in which case you'll need to add <script> directly before the event code and </script> directly after the event code).

Troubleshooting Custom Conversions

One of the most common issues with custom conversion rules is when using the URL Equals option, as it will not count a conversion if someone lands on a version of the URL with any additional text beyond what is pasted into the URL field here (ex: UTM parameters, http vs. https, or even an extra “/” at the end).

To maximize your ability to track your custom conversion accurately, we suggest using URL Contains and pasting the minimum portion of the URL needed to distinguish this page from any other pages on your website (ex: Starting after “www” and ending before “.com”, “.org”).

Troubleshooting Ad Performance

One important thing to note in order track ad performance properly when using the Facebook pixel is that you'll need to customize your ads reporting columns in Ads Manager in order to show the most important data. By default, the Results column for a Website Conversions campaign will display the total number of events/conversions associated with your ads. That means if you have ViewContent, AddToCart and Purchase events on your website, the Results column will display the aggregate number of all these events, and the Cost column will display the cost per the total number of these events as well. If you really only care about the number of Purchases and cost per Purchase, you'll need to customize your columns to select “Purchase (Facebook Pixel)” and “Cost per Purchase (Facebook Pixel)."

If you've just transitioned from the old conversion pixel and are optimizing for conversions, you may experience a few days of decreased performance while the new pixel gathers the data needed to optimize sufficiently. Please review the Optimization section in the Conversion pixel transitioning guide for recommendations and best practices.

If you're optimizing for conversions and find that you're unable to spend your daily budget (due to under-delivery) and are seeing a high cost per conversion, there's a good chance your ads are not getting enough conversions to provide sufficient data to our delivery system in order to optimize (which needs about 25 conversions to start optimizing properly). If you set a target bid, you may also see delivery decrease if our system is unable to get conversions at the desired target bid. This is often due to having small or overlapping audiences, low bid to budget ratio, poor creative/targeting or high negative feedback. Learn more about conversion optimization.

When you create an ad, you can choose to target it to people in any Custom Audiences and/or Lookalike Audiences you've created.

You can also use exclusion targeting, which prevents a particular audience from seeing the ad. For example, you can exclude an audience of your current customers if you're running a campaign to gain new customers.

To use Custom Audiences and/or Lookalike Audiences for targeting:

1. Create an Ad
2. Under Who do you want your ads to reach?, click the text box for Custom Audiences
3. Select Include or Exclude, depending on how you'd like to target your ad

4. Select the Custom Audiences and/or Lookalike Audiences you want to use

Note: You can combine multiple Custom Audiences and/or Lookalike Audiences to refine your targeting.

5. Finish setting up the ad and click Place Order

There are 2 types of data about your Custom Audience from your website that can be sent to Facebook:

• Contextual data: This type of data includes the referral URL, browser info, and the person's Facebook user ID.
• Custom data: websites can choose to send this data to Facebook through the Facebook Tag API. Keep in mind that the Custom Audience Terms of Service restricts anyone from using this feature to capture sensitive information about people using your website.

This information is shared in a privacy-safe way using hashing.

You can edit your Custom Audience at any time.

To edit your Custom Audience:

1. Go to your Audiences
2. Select your audience, then click Actions > Edit.

When you make changes, the system typically updates within a few hours. Your ads will continue running in the meantime.

Below, you'll find a table listing all the data types we can use for a Custom Audience or offline event upload. To get the highest match rate possible from your data, include as many data types as you can. You can use a single-column file to create your audience, but you may not see as many matches as you would if you used additional data types.

If you're using multiple data types, make sure your data is organized into separate columns that correspond to the types we support. For example, don't include a single column for full names. Instead, include two columns - one for first names, one for last names. Use the column headers in the table below. Doing so helps us auto-detect data types. You may use your own column headers if you prefer, but you'll then have to map the data to its type manually before uploading your customer list.

The two most important tips are:

• Always include the country code as part of your customer's phone numbers, even if all your data is from the same country.
• Always include your customers' countries in their own column in your file, even if all of your data is from the same country. Because we match on a global scale, this simple step helps us match as many people as possible from your customer list.

Your file can be either CSV or TXT format. Download an example customer list.

Learn how to create and edit a Custom Audience from a customer file.

The maximum number of Custom Audiences per account vary by type. They are:

Standard Data File Custom Audiences: 500

Custom Audiences from your website: 10000

Mobile App Custom Audiences: 200

lookalike audiences: 500

If you delete your Custom Audience from your website, any campaigns that are using that audience will be turned off.

The maximum amount of time that people will stay in a Custom Audience from your website or mobile app is 180 days. After 180 days, people who have been in the website Custom Audience will be removed unless they revisit the the website or mobile app again.

Your Custom Audience from your website will update automatically as people who fall within the rules you specified for your audience navigate to the pages on your website that have the Facebook pixel.

For example, if you set your Custom Audience to only include people who've reached the "Add to cart" page of your website, it'll automatically add people who navigate there to be part of your audience. If you didn't set any rules, then your Custom Audience will automatically update to add anyone who visits your website.

Keep in mind that it takes 24 hours after you create your Custom Audience from your website for it to start collecting data.

When you create a Custom Audience from your website, you have several options to customize it.

If you'd like to create an audience based off of various pages of your website rather than the entire domain, select People who visit specific web pages or People visiting specific web pages but not others. You can also choose to only create an audience of People who haven't visited in a certain amount of time or an entirely custom combination.

When you customize your Custom Audience from your website, you’ll need to specify the rules that will trigger the Facebook pixel to identify the person on your website. You can adjust which URLs people visit or even the standard event they trigger if you're using the Facebook pixel.

In the example below, the Custom Audience will select people who visited the URL www.yourwebsite.com/sales, but exclude people who visited the /about page.

If your website Custom Audience size is smaller than the number of website visits or pixel fires, it may be because:

• Only pixel fires get counted for website Custom Audiences.
• People viewing your website could've opted out or have other blocking tools enabled, so not every visit to your website will send a pixel fire to Facebook.
• Website visits may not always be matched to someone on Facebook. For example, if someone isn't logged into Facebook when they view your website, we can't add them to your audience.
• If a viewer visits web pages with a pixel 20 times, it'll fire 20 times, but it'll only be 1 unique person. Check the average number of pages viewed per person on your website. Similarly, if a viewer visits a page with multiple events (ex: Key page view, Add to cart), each triggered event will count as individual pixel fires but will only map to one person.
• Your audience may be limited by an audience rule. Check to see if this is the case.
• If a pixel is installed multiple times on a given web page, then multiple pixel fires only count as one valid person.
• Third-party analytics tools count unique sessions while Facebook counts people. If someone visits your website from their phone and desktop computer, or erases a cookie and refreshes the page, the third-party analytics will count 2 whereas Facebook will count 1.
• Time on which uniques is counted is often different. Third-party analytics tools often count uniques only once per 30 days whereas Facebook counts uniques all time.

Pixel fires and third-party analytics sites

Sometimes advertisers try to compare Facebook pixel fires with total visitors from other analytics platforms and see discrepancies. Here are some things to keep in mind when trying to compare numbers:

• Remember that one unique person can cause multiple pixel fires (ex: PageView fires on every page a person visits). If your third-party site says there have been 20,000 visitors, check how many pages each visitor views on average. For example, if people view 7 pages on average, you should expect about 140,000 pixel fires or more, given that you can have multiple pixel events firing on each page.
• You shouldn't expect numbers to perfectly line up between different platforms. You could try to have the pixel fire only once per person, but that would limit your retargeting and conversion tracking abilities. Think of these platforms as different as use each for their strengths. Third-party analytics sites are great for understanding your website activity, while Facebook is great for understanding people, and allowing you to build Custom Audiences and then track and optimize for conversions.
• Remember that the number of pixel fires does not equal unique visitors. This is intentional, as firing the pixel on every page allows you to build audiences and custom conversions off of specific pages people visit.

Audience counts reported by website custom audiences only measure unique visitors matched to Facebook accounts within the time frame you choose (up to 180 days). They also exclude people who opt out of ads based on website and/or app usage.

The pixel traffic reported in your pixel dashboard measures the number of times your pixel is fired (even if it's by one person multiple times or traffic that didn't come from a person on Facebook) within the time frame you choose (the last 7 days by default).

Because of these differences in measurement, counts may vary between the two.

Having overlapping audiences is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead to poor delivery of your ad sets. This is because when ad sets from the same advertiser are going to end up in the same auction (meaning they're targeting similar audiences), we enter the one with the best performance history and prevent the others from competing to get shown. We do this so your ads are not competing against each other, which can drive up costs and lead to inefficient uses of your budget. You can check if two audiences you're using are overlapping with our tool:

1. Go to your Audiences
2. Check the boxes next to the audiences you want to compare (up to 5)
3. Click Actions > Show Audience Overlap

Notes:

• The first audience you select will be listed first as the "Selected Audience." Every other audience you select will be listed in the "Comparison Audiences" section. You can change the selected audience by choosing a new one from the dropdown in the upper-right corner of the tool. You can choose from any of the audiences you selected.
• You can only get useful overlap information from audiences with at least 10,000 people, so consider that when selecting which audiences to compare.

The tool will show both the "Overlap" and the "% Overlap of Selected Audience." The "Overlap" column shows the number of people who are in both audiences. The "% Overlap of Selected Audience" column compares the number of people who are in both audiences to the total number of people in the selected audience to show the percentage of overlap. This column is why the selected audience is separate from the comparison audience. Here's an example to help explain:

Say you have a selected audience with 1,000,000 people (we'll call this Audience A) and a comparison audience of 100,000,000 people (we'll call this Audience B), and that there are 800,000 people that are in both audiences. The number 800,000 remains constant no matter which audience is "selected" and which is "comparison." However, the percentage of overlap will change if you switch which is "selected" and which is "comparison." 800,000 means that Audience B overlaps with 80% of Audience A. However, if Audience A becomes the selected audience that figure changes. Audience A only overlaps with 8% of Audience B. In practice, this means that the overlap between the two audiences is more likely to cause delivery problems for ad sets targeting Audience A than ad sets targeting Audience B.

If audience overlap is causing you problems:

• Consolidate your overlapping ad sets. If some ad sets are targeting very similar audiences, you could see better results by consolidating them into one with a larger budget.
• Refine your targeting. Take advantage of location, age, gender, interest and/or behavior-based targeting to ensure each ad set has a specific and distinct audience. You can also try creating separate Custom Audiences (from a pixel or your customer data) or Lookalike Audiences (of people similar to your best customers) for each ad set.

Consolidation and refinement are opposite ways of solving the problem. (One makes an audience larger, the other makes an audience smaller.) The best choice is different for each situation. However, a useful idea to keep in mind when deciding is: If two audiences are distinct enough that you set different bids for ad sets targeting one compared to the other, try keeping them separate and refining them further. If not, try consolidating them and combining their budgets.

If you're still having trouble, check out this general troubleshooting guide.

If you're having trouble with this in relation to lookalike audiences, consider trying out the advanced options for lookalike audience creation.

You're asked to review and accept the Custom Audience terms when you create a Custom Audience for the first time.

Learn more about our terms of use:

• Custom Audiences Terms
• Custom Audiences from your website or mobile app Terms

Advertisers create Custom Audiences on Facebook based on information they already have, like your name or contact information. To find out if you’re seeing an ad because you’re included in a Custom Audience:

1. Click the or near the top-right corner of any ad on Facebook
2. Select Why am I seeing this?

If you’re seeing the ad because you’re included in a Custom Audience, you’ll see the explanation that the advertiser is reaching you based on their customer list or contact info you provided them off of Facebook.

Since Custom Audiences are based on information advertisers collect off of Facebook, advertisers may offer you controls directly, such as making it voluntary to receive offers and promotions from them.

Advertisers can also choose to offer an opt-out for their Custom Audiences on Facebook. If the advertiser does offer an opt-out, you’ll see a link to the opt-out when you select Why am I seeing this? You can also select Hide all from this advertiser to stop seeing any of an advertiser’s ads, both from Custom Audiences and any other way the advertiser may be showing you ads on Facebook.