Facebook Custom Audiences for Customer File is showing "Not Available" and affecting Ad Performance

January 31, 2018 (1/31/18) - Facebook custom audiences created using your customer file (or customer list) is showing "Not Available" for many ad managers and could also be affecting ad performance.

My current ad campaign was running at its lower-than-usual performance levels and we were not seeing results.

The below picture was taken after the campaign had been running for 6 Days.

The reach was much lower than we felt it should be, so I checked the target audience and the list and that is when I discovered that my customer list was showing something unusual.

Once the target audience was adjusted to remove the list and the look-alike audience from that list so that the only thing we focused on were his website pixel custom audience and the facebook page engagement custom audience, we saw dramatic increase in performance.

I sent a support request to Facebook and received the following reply:

Thank you for contacting Facebook Ad Support. My name is Collin and I'd be happy to answer this inquiry!

As noted in our advertising principles, we're constantly looking to improve the quality and security of our advertising platforms. After identifying a technical issue with reach estimation for Custom Audiences that could potentially allow misuse of the functionality, we're temporarily removing the ability to see audience sizes or potential reach estimates for newly created or edited Custom Audiences in Ads Manager and Power Editor, followed by the Ads API by December 22.

Specifically, we are removing reach estimates for:

Custom Audiences from a customer file

Offline conversions Custom Audiences

Website and mobile app Custom Audiences if using advanced matching via the API

Website or mobile app Custom Audiences that do not include customer data and engagement Custom Audiences are unaffected by this update.

Please note that you will still be able to create Custom Audiences, as well as ads using any type of Custom Audiences, on our platform. Ads delivery and reporting will remain unaffected by this change.

We understand this solution may affect your campaign planning. To minimize disruption, we are currently investigating solutions to restore these reach estimates in our interfaces.

I have since replied to him and let him know that this change was affecting our campaign and I'll let you know if we receive any word back about this through an UPDATE to this article.

Need help figuring out how to use your customer list for Facebook Ads? Schedule a Free 30-minute Consultation with me.