How long before I can start using my Custom Audience?

When you create an audience with SyncTap, we immediately send that audience over to your Facebook ad account.

In the case of a Customer Based Audience (CBA), Facebook will then take your list of customers and try to "match" them to an active Facebook/Instagram profile. 

The official word from Facebook is that it takes up to 24 hours for those contacts to be matched.

But from experience, those audiences are usually ready to go in an hour or less.

The larger the audience, the longer it usually takes for the matching process to complete.

In the case of Activity Based Audiences (ABA), these populate much faster and are usually ready in a matter of minutes. That's because these audiences rely on data from the Facebook pixel you have installed on your store that's readily available.

If you audience hasn't finished matching, you may get an error when trying to use it as the basis for a Lookalike audience or to target within your campaign. That's because Facebook thinks the audience is "too small", when it really just hasn't fully populated.