Help · Audience

Send segments to your ads

Send a segment to Meta and it becomes an audience in your ad account, kept up to date every hour. You choose what the audience is for: showing your ads to the people in it, or keeping your ads away from them. Google is next.

For most stores the second use is the more valuable one. Keeping ads away from people who already bought, or who bought in the last week, stops you paying to show an ad to someone who has just paid you.

Connecting Meta

Your store's owner or a manager connects Meta once, from Settings → Integrations. Press Connect Meta, sign in with Facebook, and choose the ad account to use if your sign-in reaches more than one.

Meta asks for one more thing before it takes any audience: its Custom Audience terms must be accepted for that ad account. If they are not, the card says so and offers Accept Meta's terms, which opens Meta's own page. Someone who manages the ad account in Meta accepts them there; then press Check again.

Once connected, the card shows the ad account, who connected it and when, how many segments are being sent, and the account's last 30 days: impressions, reach, clicks, spend and conversions.

A marketer can send segments and stop them but cannot connect or disconnect. Nobody from Carpe Messaging's own staff can connect, send or stop for you, or delete a segment while it is being sent, and neither can an AI assistant you connected.

Changing the rule of a segment that is being sent changes who is in the audience at the next hourly update, so only a team member who can send to Meta can do it — the owner, a manager or a marketer. Our staff, an AI assistant you connected and your store's API key cannot change that rule while the segment is being sent; they can still rename it or change its labels. For them the segment builder shows the rule read-only and says why. Stop sending it first, or ask a team member who can send.

The same goes for a list that segment uses. Deleting the list makes is on it match nobody, and restoring it makes it match again, so either one changes who is in the audience. While a segment that uses the list is being sent, only a team member who can send to Meta can delete or restore the list.

A built-in segment that is being sent cannot be disabled in Settings until you stop sending it; disabled, it would leave every screen while its audience kept updating.

Sending a segment

Open the segment on Audience → Segments and press Send to Meta in its Advertising card. Choose what the audience is for, check the name, and press Send to Meta. The first update starts within five minutes.

Before you send, the dialog shows how many people will be sent and, line by line, how many will not and why (see Who is never sent below). Each segment can be sent once for each purpose — once to show ads, once to keep ads away.

The built-in segments you can only view — the bot check's two and Checkout bots — have no Advertising card and cannot be sent. They hold people the app has set aside, not an audience.

After that, every hour, people who joined the segment are added, people who left are removed, and anyone whose email, phone or address changed is updated. Once a week the whole audience is sent again in full, to correct any drift.

The audience's name

The dialog suggests a plain name, such as Carpe Messaging audience 7QK2, and never sends your segment's own name. You can change it. Each audience you are sending on one ad account needs its own name: if another one already has it, the dialog asks you to choose a different name.

Meta and Google can refuse audiences whose names suggest health, money or other personal topics — a segment called "Sensitive skin" or "Spent over $500" is exactly that. If Meta refuses an audience because of its name, the audience pauses, you get an email, and the card says so. Stop sending it, then send the segment again under a plain name.

Match rates, small audiences and the wait

Meta only finds the people it recognizes, so an audience in Meta is smaller than the number sent. That is normal for every store and every tool.

Meta can take up to a day to match the people sent. An audience of fewer than 100 matched people may not be usable for ads, and the dialog warns you when fewer than 100 would be sent.

Who is never sent

Some people in a segment are never sent, and the dialog counts each group before you press anything:

• People in Europe, the UK or Switzerland, judged by their country, their phone number or their email address. If any one of them points to Europe, the UK or Switzerland, they are not sent. This applies to both purposes.
• People who opted out of data sharing in your store. When a shopper opts out on your store's data sharing opt-out page, Shopify records it and we honor it, for both purposes. Their profile page says so.
• People who complained about your email, for an audience that shows ads. They are sent to an audience that keeps ads away — keeping ads away from them shows them nothing.
• People with no email address and no phone number, because there is nothing Meta could match them on.
• Erased profiles, and profiles whose identity is not verified yet.

Consent to email or text messages does not decide who is sent. Someone who unsubscribed from your email can still be in an audience: an audience is not a message.

If your store itself is in Europe, the UK or Switzerland, ad audiences are not available yet, and the Integrations card says so in place of the Connect button.

When someone asks not to be used for ads

There are two ways, and the first is better. When a shopper opts out of the sale or sharing of their data on your store's data sharing opt-out page, Shopify records it and they are never sent. If they were already in an audience, they are taken out within a day.

When the request reaches you some other way — an email, a reply — add a Shopify tag to that customer (for example no-ads) and exclude that tag in every segment you send to Meta. The next hourly update removes them. It has to be in every segment the person could be in, which is why the first way is better.

Your own privacy policy

Your store's privacy policy should say that you share information with advertising platforms to show and target ads. Google requires it for its audiences. Check your policy says so before you send a segment.

When Meta pauses sending

If Meta disables or closes your ad account, the Custom Audience terms are no longer accepted, or Meta stops accepting the connection, sending pauses and the team member who connected Meta gets an email (the store's owner, if that person has left your team). The card on Settings → Integrations says what happened.

Sending starts again by itself when the ad account is active again — nobody has to press anything. The one exception is a connection Meta no longer accepts: press Connect Meta again on the card.

If an audience has not updated three times in a row, its row in the segment's Advertising card says since when and why.

Stopping and disconnecting

Stop sending on an audience's row stops updating it. Disconnect on the Integrations card stops every audience at once.

Either way, the audience stays in your Meta ad account with the people already in it until you delete it there. We delete our own record of who was sent at once. Deleting a segment stops the audiences it was sent as, too.

Postal codes

Profiles carry a postal code beside their city, which helps Meta match people. Profiles explains where a location comes from — including that an order's ship-to address can be a gift recipient's.