Marketing Cloud Advertising

Implementation Guide
Salesforce, Spring ’24

Last updated: March 22, 2024

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CONTENTS

Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Roles and Permissions for Advertising Audiences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Set Up Marketing Cloud Advertising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
MARKETING CLOUD ADVERTISING IMPLEMENTATION
GUIDE

You can use Marketing Cloud Advertising to coordinate campaigns with social, mobile, sales, and customer service efforts. Marketing
Cloud Advertising helps you enhance your email marketing goals with advertising. Use Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, LinkedIn,
Twitter, Pinterest, or Snapchat to engage with existing customers. Find new prospects with lookalikes, and re-engage inactive users
within the customer journey across digital advertising.

Note: Advertising Studio is now called Marketing Cloud Advertising. During this transition, you may see references to
AdvertisingStudio.
Use Advertising Audiences in Marketing Cloud Advertising to activate your CRM data for targeting.
Journey Builder Ads integrates advertising campaigns into your overall customer journey.
Lead Capture connects your Facebook advertising leads to your Marketing Cloud data in real time.

Who This Guide Is For

This guide is for Marketing Cloud admins, partners, and developers to implement Marketing Cloud Advertising including Audiences,
Lead Capture, and Advertising in Journey Builder.

Before You Start

Advertising Audiences Prerequisites:
• A provisioned Marketing Cloud Advertising license.
• Data and data sources that exist in the Marketing Cloud.
• Marketing Cloud users with access and required Advertising Audiences roles & permissions.
• Created Advertising accounts (Facebook, Twitter, and so on).

Note: External advertising accounts must be authorized by a Marketing Cloud Admin with API enabled. Accounts also must have
the following permissions: Facebook - Admin; Google - Standard or Admin Twitter - Admin or Ad Manager
Journey Builder Prerequisites:
• Journey Builder access and a Marketing Cloud Advertising license.
• Data extensions enabled in Marketing Cloud.
• Authorized Facebook account in Advertising Audiences.
Lead Capture Prerequisites:

Note: A Marketing Cloud Advertising license isn’t required for Lead Capture. After November 21, 2018 and if you’re a new Marketing
Cloud customer, you can install Lead Capture via AppExchange. Existing customers continue to use Lead Capture within Marketing
Cloud Advertising.
• Facebook account credentials with page level Admin access to be able to create a Lead Capture task.
• Data extensions enabled in Marketing Cloud.
• An existing Facebook lead advertising form.

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Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Guide Roles and Permissions for Advertising Audiences

Roles and Permissions for Advertising Audiences

Learn how user roles determine permissions for Advertising Audiences in Marketing Cloud Advertising.
• Marketing Cloud Administrator: This role is consistent with the Marketing Cloud Admin role.
• Marketing Cloud Channel Manager: This role is focused on day-to-day functionality and consistent with the Marketing Cloud Channel
Manager role.

Permissions Chart
Action Administrator Channel Manager
Add Users Yes No

Add Social Accounts Yes No

Add Ad Accounts Yes No

Create, Edit, and Publish Audiences Yes Yes

Create Lookalikes Yes Yes

Refresh Existing Audiences Yes Yes

Modify Refresh Schedules Yes Yes

Delete Existing Audiences Yes No

View Dashboard and Audience Details Yes Yes

Add or Modify Email Notifications Yes Yes

Set Up Marketing Cloud Advertising

In this section we will review the implementation steps needed to create Audiences, to begin using Journey Builder Ads, and to configure
Lead Capture.

Advertising Audiences
Marketing Cloud Advertising helps you target your digital advertising campaigns across various platforms with Advertising Audiences.
These platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Pinterest, and Snapchat.
Use Advertising Audiences to:
• Reach existing customers with targeted and specific messaging.
• Acquire new customers by creating seed audiences that can be expressed as lookalike audiences on destination networks.
• Suppress existing customers for acquisition campaigns.
• Re-engage unengaged email subscribers.
You can also configure audiences to refresh automatically. If you discontinue your Ad Studio license, you must delete all audiences and
authorized accounts.

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Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Guide Create an Audience in Marketing Cloud Advertising

Create an Audience in Marketing Cloud Advertising

You can create an audience in Marketing Cloud Advertising for Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and
Snapchat ad accounts.

Tip: Check the Population Stats panel in the Overview tab to verify that you haven’t reached your maximum number of available
audiences. If all audiences are in use, delete an audience you no longer need or contact your account executive to purchase more.
1. Click Create Audience.
2. Enter a name and optionally a description.

Note: Name is a required value. It uniquely identifies this audience in the application and social ad accounts.

Note: Name is the unique identifier for this audience in the application and social ad accounts.

3. If applicable, select an onboarding partner.

4. Choose the destination ad network.
5. Select an ad account.

Note: To create a Facebook audience, accept the Facebook Terms of Service.

6. Return to the Overview screen.

7. To select a configuration option for the new audience, click Configure or click Save & Close.
8. To get a stable audience count, allow 24–48 hours.

Configure an Audience from a Data Extension

Use attributes in a data extension to configure an audience in Marketing Cloud Advertising.

Note: You can use Data Extensions with Field Level Encryption to create audiences within Advertising Audiences.

1. Select to configure a new or existing audience.

2. Choose Data Extension.
3. Locate the data sources.
4. Click Select.
5. Choose an attribute from the selected data extension. You can change attributes before saving or activating the audience.

Note: If you see a message stating that no attributes were found, select a different source with the desired attribute.
Alternatively, delete the attribute by clicking the trashcan icon.

6. If necessary, repeat steps 1–5 to add a second attribute.

7. Save, exit, or activate the audience.

Configure Notifications in Marketing Cloud Advertising

To send a notification email from Marketing Cloud Advertising when an audience upload or refresh is complete or when errors or other
events occur, enable and configure notification settings.
For an Audience in active status:

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Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Guide Refresh an Audience

1. Select the audience from the list of active or draft audiences.

2. Click Change in the Notification Settings.
3. Select a notification.
4. Enter at least one email address. To send notifications to multiple addresses, enter each email address in the designated field separated
by commas.
5. Click Done.
6. Click Save, Save and Exit, or Activate.

Refresh an Audience
Configure refresh for an Marketing Cloud Advertising audience.
The Audience Refresh section displays the audience refresh schedule. The refresh schedule depends on the refresh option selected
including an audience set to activate and refresh immediately.
1. First, choose a specific audience.
1. Open Advertising Audiences.
2. Select an audience name for an audience not currently under draft.
To delete the audience, click Delete.

Note: Only an Administrator can delete an audience. That same audience gets removed or set to inactive simultaneously for
Facebook, Google, and Twitter. If the audience is active, any gathered matching and refresh data are lost.

3. To refresh the audience manually, follow these steps.

a. Click Refresh Now.
b. Click Activate.

4. To configure an automated audience refresh, follow these steps.

a. Click Change.
b. Select Schedule Refreshes.
c. Set the frequency of refreshes including the time of day you want the refresh to occur.
d. Click Done.
e. Click Activate.

Note: Once the audience is created it is then hashed using SHA-256 and sent to the destination network via the already
established API connection.

Advertising in Journey Builder

In Journey Builder, you can create a Facebook campaign or build ad audiences for Facebook, Google Ads, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Pinterest.
To use this feature, make sure you have enabled Marketing Cloud Advertising and Journey Builder.
With Journey Builder Advertising, you can build cross-channel journeys that combine email, mobile, and Facebook advertising. Use the
Ad Campaigns activity to increase the reach of your email campaigns.

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Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Guide Advertising in Journey Builder

Create a Journey Builder Advertising Audience

Follow these steps to create an Advertising Audience in Journey Builder to use in a Journey Builder Advertising campaign.

Note: Journey Builder Audiences doesn't support field-level encryption.

This feature uses an email address to match audience contacts. The audience refreshes daily.
1. Drag the Ad Campaign activity onto the Journey Builder canvas.
2. Click Configure.
3. Enter an audience name.
4. Enter a description for the audience, as necessary.
5. Select the ad account to use.

Note: Only accounts authorized for Advertising Audiences and Advertising Campaigns are available.

6. Select a retention period.

7. Click Next.

Note: The audience is created when the activity is saved. Lookalike audiences, refresh settings, and email notifications can
be modified from within Advertising Audiences after this audience is created.

Create Content for a Journey Builder Advertising Campaign

Create the content for an ad to use in your Journey Builder Advertising campaign.
Complete these steps to create the content for an ad in a Journey Builder Advertising campaign.

Note: Journey Builder Advertising Campaigns doesn't support field-level encryption.

1. Select the Facebook page to use.

2. Enter the creative name.
3. Enter the ad copy in text.
4. Enter the destination link URL.
5. Enter the display link.
6. Enter the headline.
7. Enter the link description.
8. To add an image to your creative, click Select Image.

Note: To change the image, click Select a Different Image.

9. Select a call to action button to use.

10. Click Next.

Configure a Journey Builder Advertising Campaign

Name your Journey Builder Advertising Campaign and set its budget.

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Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Guide Advertising in Journey Builder

Tip: To optimize your campaign, we recommend a minimum of $100 per day for a minimum audience size of 1000.

1. Enter a campaign name.

2. Enter the total spend.

Ad Studio Supported Currencies

CAD KRW

AUD SGD

USD HKD

GBP IDR

JPY MYR

INR THB

DKK PHP

BRL VND

EUR TWD

3. Enter the maximum daily budget.

Tip: The actual daily spend typically varies slightly.

4. Click Next.

Review and Launch the Journey Builder Advertising Campaign

Review and save the configurations for your Journey Builder Advertising campaign. From here, you can return to the Journey Builder
canvas and continue your campaign launch.
1. Review the summary.
2. To edit any settings, click Back to return to the appropriate step.
3. To complete the configuration, click Done.

Note: To edit the Journey Builder Advertising Campaign before you activate the journey, hover over the activity, and click
Edit.

The Journey Builder canvas reappears. From here, you can activate the journey.

Note: When customers exit a journey, they’re removed from any Advertising Audience associated with the campaign after the
number of days you selected. Days contacts will be retained is an option in the Create Audience step. To avoid retargeting
the same customers, don’t select the Contacts will not be removed option.

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Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Guide Lead Capture

Lead Capture
Lead capture allows Marketing and Sales Cloud customers to connect their Facebook and Instagram lead generation ad campaigns
directly into the Marketing Cloud or Sales Cloud, so leads can be captured in real time, responded to using Marketing Cloud automations
and assigned to a Sales Rep to nurture and close.

Import Facebook or Google Leads into Marketing Cloud Engagement

Lead Capture collects Facebook and Google leads. Set up a lead capture task to synchronize advertising leads to a data extension.

Test Lead Capture Tasks

Use the Facebook Lead Ads Testing Tool to create a test lead in Marketing Cloud Advertising.

Note: Log in to a Facebook account to test your lead ads. Need help? Visit Facebook’s troubleshooting guide.

We recommend that you test a lead capture task and lead nurturing, such as Journey Builder activities, before you run a Facebook Lead
generation ad campaign.
1. Go to https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lead-ads-testing.
2. Select the Facebook page and lead advertising form to use.
3. To customize the lead form inputs, click Preview Form. If not customized, Facebook generates fake inputs for each field in the form.
4. Click Create Lead.
5. Log in to Marketing Cloud Engagement.
6. Navigate to Audience Builder, and select Contact Builder.
7. Select the Data Extensions tab.

Note: Test leads created using the Facebook lead testing tool generates within minutes.

8. To view the lead in a data extension, click Records.

Delete a Lead Capture Task in Marketing Cloud Advertising

When you want to update a lead form, first delete the Lead Capture task in Marketing Cloud Advertising. Deleting the task prevents the
import of future leads, but preserves any previously imported leads.
1. In Advertising, navigate to Lead Capture.
2. Next to the task you want to delete, click the arrow under Actions.
3. Select Delete Task and then confirm.

Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Best Practices

This information helps you understand Marketing Cloud Advertising and how to best manage your implementation.

Audience Management and Best Practices

Find important information regarding audience managements, including match counts, audience minimums, error handling, and
implementation best practices.

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Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Guide Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Best Practices

Audience Management
Customers purchase a set number of audiences when they obtain an Marketing Cloud Advertising license. Here is some information
about audience management.
• Each channel is counted as one audience against the total number purchased.
• A lookalike audience based on a seed audience is counted separately.
• Audiences in a draft or error state do not count against the allotted number of audiences.
• You can find the total number of audiences available to the enterprise and the total number of audiences used among all business
units (MIDs) under that enterprise’s Audience Studio dashboard.

Deleting Audiences
To reduce your audience count, an Admin within Marketing Cloud Advertising can delete audiences. Deleting an audience from Marketing
Cloud also deletes the audience from the network for Facebook, Google, and Twitter. LinkedIn and Pinterest audiences are deleted from
the Marketing Cloud only.

Tip: To recreate an audience, change the name of the audience to avoid a duplicate name error.

Audience Creation from Data Extensions

Data extensions (DE) are used for creating audiences within Marketing Cloud Advertising. Here are some tips and recommendations
when creating your DEs.
• To avoid long processing times, limit the number of columns in tables and remove unnecessary data.
• Use the appropriate data type and field length, but avoid field lengths that are greater than 100 characters.
• All audience data extensions require an email address field with the email data type, even if it is left blank.
• Add the country code if including a phone number. For example, add +1 for phone numbers originating from the USA.
• Salesforce data extensions are not compatible with Marketing Cloud Advertising.
• Group and filtered lists are not compatible with Marketing Cloud Advertising.

Tip: When importing into an audience source data extension, review these import options. They can impact audience processing.

Overwrite Use Overwrite only to change all the data in the data extension.
Overwrite can cause low match count on the destination network
and possibly cause the audience to fail.

Add and Update Use Add and Update when adding new data and updating
existing data

Add Only Use Add Only if you are only adding new data.

Update Only Use Update Only when data is changing in a data extension. This
option does not add any new rows from the source.

Match Counts and Advance Match

A match is made when the destination network recognizes the contact information that was sent in the audience and can confirm a 1:1
match. Facebook Advanced Match is available in Advertising Audiences and in Journey Builder's Ad Audience Activity.

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Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Guide Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Best Practices

Facebook Advanced Match allows Facebook to make a 1:1 match on an individual in the absence of an individual identifier (email address,
phone number, mobile advertiser ID). Facebook first tries to make a match via a unique identifier. If no match was made, it uses other
data points (such as first and last name, state, birth date) to make the match.
Google Customer Match allows Google platforms to make a match on more identifiers including email address, mobile ID, phone number,
address info (first name, last name, ZIP code, country code), or user ID.

Tip: Always include a unique identifier and as many “soft identifiers” as possible. Audience match rates only increase with more
identifiers.

Note: Match rates sometimes fluctuate based on the data retention rules established on the audience source data extension.

Audience Minimums
Networks have audience minimum requirements to protect user privacy and prevent advertisers from serving ads to a specific individual.
The minimums impact matched users, not the number of contacts uploaded. Review these audience minimums by network:
• Facebook and Instagram - 20
• Pinterest - 100
• LinkedIn - 300
• Twitter - 500
• Google - 1,000

Audience Processing Times

Once an audience is successfully sent from the Marketing Cloud to the destination network, there are unique processing times. Audience
processing times vary but we suggest waiting between 24-48 hours to ensure a stable audience. Once completed and stable, the
audience is available to be used within a media campaign.

Lookalikes
Facebook lookalike audiences can be created in Marketing Cloud to match on either Similarity or Reach.
Similarity: Creates an audience of up to 1% of the US population that looks most like your seed audience. This audience is smaller in size
but more finely tuned or a closer match to your seed audience.
Reach: Creates an audience of up to 10% of the US population that looks like your seed audience. This audience is larger and casts a
wider net, but is not as finely tuned.

Tip: Best practice is to create the lookalike audience after the seed audience is active, not at the same time.

Note: Match rates and audience counts do not display in Ad Studio for lookalikes. Because there is no matching, Facebook creates
the audience, which contains people who look like the people in your seed audience.

Refreshing and Refresh Cadence

Audience refreshing is an important offering of Marketing Cloud Advertising. It is important that audiences refresh continually once they
are live. This refresh ensures that the right ads are sent to the right individuals and that individuals who engage with a brand are removed
from that audience.

Note: Contact your Account Executive if you see weekly refreshes only as an option. You should see the option to refresh daily
or weekly.

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Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Guide Marketing Cloud Advertising FAQs

General Error Handling

• Refresh Error: If a live audience is set to refresh and for some reason it fails to, it goes into an error state. If this happens, refresh the
audience yourself. Once active again, it continues to refresh if that was selected.
• Audience Processing Failure: Large files can result in errors during processing. Divide the files into multiple data extensions to get
them to process and successfully make it to the network.

Marketing Cloud Advertising FAQs

Find answers to frequently asked questions about Marketing Cloud Advertising features.

Does Marketing Cloud Advertising Support Field-Level Encryption?

No. Marketing Cloud Advertising can work with field-level encryption for text and email data types for Advertising Audiences only, but
the encryption functionality isn’t supported. Field-level encryption isn’t supported for Journey Builder Audiences or Journey Builder
Campaigns.

Are Email Addresses Shared with Facebook or Other Networks?

No. Before an email address is submitted to any network via API, it’s securely hashed using SHA256 in Marketing Cloud Engagement.

Are There Limits on the Number of Audiences Created?

Yes. Your Salesforce agreement specifies the number of active audiences you can have at any point in time. When you reach that limit,
delete an existing audience or contact your account representative to purchase more audiences.

Are There Limits on the Size of Audiences?

No. There are no firm limitations on audience size when creating an audience. However, due to extended processing times and the
negative impact on performance, avoid refreshing audiences of more than 20 million contacts. Contact Support if you must refresh an
audience of over 20 million contacts. Alternately, a contact segment of over 20 million can be created each time you want to update it.

How Often Can Audiences Be Refreshed?

Audiences can be refreshed daily or weekly, up to 99 weeks.

How Long Before My Audiences Are Available on the Destination Network?

Processing times vary by network, but can be up to 48 hours. Facebook audiences are often available to target within minutes, but can
take a few hours to fully populate. The match rates depicted in Marketing Cloud Advertising can vary during the first 48 hours while the
destination networks process audience counts.

How Many Ad Accounts Can I Associate with an Audience?

Only one ad account is allowed per audience.

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Marketing Cloud Advertising Implementation Guide Marketing Cloud Advertising FAQs

How Do I Sort Audience Names in the Overview Tab Using Non-ASCII Characters?
Advertising Audiences uses the Unicode character set (UTF-8), which respects the Unicode order when sorting.

Why Is the Match Rate Over 100%?

The destination network can take several hours to process a large audience sent from Marketing Cloud Engagement. The destination
network usually processes audience additions first, then audience deletions. This process can result in the returned audience count
greater than the size of the original data source. When deletions are processed, the match count is more representative of the data
source.
This issue is most often observed in audiences where the data source is volatile or where large numbers of removals occur between
refreshes. In these cases, the match rate is rarely accurate due to the processing time required on the destination network.

Does Marketing Cloud Advertising Send Audiences to Instagram?

Instagram is part of Facebook, and ads are created and managed through the Facebook advertising account. The audiences sent to
Facebook can be picked up and used as targeting in an Instagram campaign.

Why Do I Need to Reauthorize an Advertising Account in Marketing Cloud Advertising?

Reauthorization is necessary for several reasons.
• The authorized account user changed their password.
• The authorized user’s ad account is revoked.
• Tokens expired.

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