Upload your buyers or students to Facebook
Facebook and Instagram ads can be shown to people who are already your customers, if you give Facebook a file of their details. Bernard does not connect to Facebook, but it can give you that file. This page is how to make one that holds only the people you mean.
The prompt
“I want to upload my [buyers / students] from [my site] to Facebook for ads. Tell me how many I have and which tag to give them before I download my contacts.”
Signed in, Get my prompt fills in your site for you. Otherwise press Copy and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard once: Use your own AI (opens in a new tab).
Step 1: tag the people you want
The contacts download has no column that says “buyer” or “student”. It does have a column of tags, so tag the group first.
- Open Your customers, then Contacts.
- Use the All contact types menu to show only Buyers or only Students.
- Tick the people you want. You can tick a whole page at once, and your ticks stay as you turn pages.
- Give them a tag, for example
facebook-buyers. You can tag up to 200 people at a time, so for a bigger group do it in batches.
Only people who bought or enrolled through your bernard site, or whom you enrolled by hand, are buyers or students here. A sale that happened on another service is not in your contacts unless you added that person.
Step 2: download your contacts
On the same page, use Export. You get one spreadsheet file of your whole contact book, with these columns:
- name, email, phone, notes and tags
- can_email, email_status, email_status_date, consent_source and unsubscribed_at, which are about email permission
Can I download my contacts, with who I’m allowed to email? explains every column.
Step 3: cut the file down
Open the file in a spreadsheet. Filter the tags column to rows that contain your tag, and keep only those. Then keep only the columns you mean to share, such as name, email and phone, and delete the rest.
The permission columns are there to protect your email list. They do not tell you whether somebody agreed to ads, so do not treat a “yes” in can_email as a yes for Facebook. Whether you may use your customers’ details for ads is set by what you told them when they gave you those details. If you are not sure, read your privacy notice before you upload.
Step 4: upload it to Facebook
Upload the file in Facebook’s ad tools, following Facebook’s own help for that part. Bernard has no part in it and cannot see what Facebook does with the file.
Keeping it current
The file is a copy of the day you made it. Nothing keeps Facebook in step with your contacts. When you want to add new buyers, tag them, download again and upload the new file.
If you want to email this group rather than advertise to it, you do not need a file at all. A campaign can go to your buyers or your students directly, and only to the people who may be emailed: see Who will receive my email campaign?.
Questions people ask
- Does bernard send my contacts to Facebook?
- No. There is no connection to Facebook and nothing is sent anywhere. You download a file of your contacts and upload it to Facebook yourself. Downloading only reads your records, so there is nothing to approve and nothing changes.
- Can I download only my buyers?
- Not directly. The download is always your whole contact book. The file does not say who is a buyer or a student, but it does carry each person’s tags. So give your buyers a tag first, then keep only the rows with that tag.
- Does can_email yes mean I may upload that person to Facebook?
- No. The can_email column says whether you may email somebody. It says nothing about ads. Whether you may use someone’s details for ads depends on what you told them when they gave you their details, so check your privacy notice first.
- Will Facebook stay up to date as I get new buyers?
- No. The file is a copy of today. When you have new buyers, tag them, download again and upload the new file.
- Can Bernard do this for me in chat?
- Bernard can tell you how many buyers or students you have and help you choose a tag name. The download itself is a button on the Contacts tab, for you to press.