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You are here: Home / Blog / Facebook just killed the most effective way to create Custom Audiences… and it’s good news for you!

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Facebook just killed the most effective way to create Custom Audiences… and it’s good news for you!

September 12, 2014 45 Comments Massimo Chieruzzi

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By now you should all know how effective Custom Audiences are. What you may not know is that lots of users gamed the system (and broke Facebook’s ToS and probably many privacy laws while they were at it) by creating custom audiences with Facebook User IDs they were not authorized to use… until now. Facebook is finally cracking down on scraping.

Facebook Scraping

 

The method is simple. The internet is flooded with shady marketeers selling software or browser add-ons that can scrape Facebook to obtain User IDs. It is easy and damn effective.
Want to target members of a laser-focused group for your market? Simply upload your tool of choice and let it crawl the group’s pages, gathering all visible users’ IDs. Want to target a competitor’s page which is not listed as an interest in Facebook Ads’ precise targeting? No problem! In just a few minutes you can generate a txt file containing the user IDs of every user that ever interacted with any of your competitor’s posts.

But is Facebook scraping really effective?

Yes, it’s extremely effective. Not only can you target a specific group or Facebook page’s users, you can also target the most engaged users.

One of the biggest problems with Facebook Ads precise interests is that many brands are buying fans from shady companies selling 100,000 likes for $10. You get what you pay for: your new users are bots, fakes, or the best case scenario is that the new likes come from real users, but they are not at all interested in your brands. And here’s the kicker – when you market those brands you’re going to target all those crappy users as well, lowering you campaign’s effectiveness.

By using Facebook scraping tools you could bypass this problem. These tools only collect the user IDs of users who have engaged with the page’s posts. By doing so they give you only the IDs of really engaged users; those likers really ready to be targeted with ads through custom audiences. I’ve seen affiliate marketers achieve incredible performance using this method.

So, why didn’t we tell you about this before??

Because they’re just quick fixes. We want you to succeed and build a long term, profitable strategy to grow your business with Facebook Ads. You can only achieve this by understanding Facebook Ads and building a predictable framework to promote your product and scale your advertising as you grow.

Tactics like scraping Facebook User IDs are just shortcuts. They work well but they are totally unpredictable, they come and go every couple of months and could get you in serious trouble – like having your advertising account banned or even being sued for breaking privacy laws. If you’re going after easy money for a couple of weeks that’s fine, but if you want to grow your business they’ll do more harm than good. And that’s not what we want for our customers.

Don’t believe me? Here are some examples of damage done by other similar tricks:

  • SEO: Demand Media, owner of popular websites such as eHow, based its business on content farms. Its sites became huge portals full of crappy content meant only to generate traffic from Google. When Google cracked down on spammy content Demand Media lost 42% of its traffic in under a month.
  • AdSense: Publishers used crazy tactics to earn money with Google Adsense. For example they created pages on generic topics such as cooking, then they hid high-paying keywords like “lawyer consulting” near adverts to trick Google into displaying very lucrative ads for lawyers instead of more relevant ads about cooking. Of course Google found out and disabled their accounts, leaving them with a $0 revenue stream.
  • Facebook: We reported before some crazy tricks to get cheap likes for Facebook pages. Not only have these people got pages full of crappy, disengaged users, they’ve also had their advertising accounts banned and, in some cases, their pages shut down.

So why are we telling you all of this now? Because Facebook just ended the scraping game!

Just this morning, in the weekly update from Facebook we immediately noticed an announcement regarding Custom Audiences:

You must now include the App ID when creating a CA built from Facebook IDs or App-Scoped IDs.

This is just an elegant way to say: STOP SCRAPING. We’ve already talked about this in our Custom Audiences guide, but as a reminder, you can only create Custom Audiences with users that gave you permission to use their personal data. Of course you have no authorization to use Facebook User IDs. The same problem may apply to email addresses and phone numbers but Facebook has no way to check how you acquired those. On the other hand Facebook can be sure that the only way you may have legally obtained a User ID is via the user using your Facebook app.

Here’s what happens in Facebook Ads Manager when you create a new Custom Audience and select that you want to upload a file with Facebook User IDs:

Custom audience scraping block

You are immediately required to enter the app ID for the Facebook app from which you gathered those IDs. We experimented to see what would happen if we uploaded randomly-picked user IDs using the app ID from one of our apps and we can confirm that Facebook is validating whether the uploaded IDs really used the app.

An error was triggered and the scraped Custom Audience was rejected.

Custom audience scraping error

Importantly, using external Facebook Ads Managers like AdEspresso still seems to bypass the control. This is only to be expected as the change has just been announced and it takes time to implement the new validation. Don’t count on this loophole to last for long however. Pretty soon there will be no way to upload Custom Audiences that you have obtained through Facebook scraping..

So why is all of this good news?

Well, if you’ve been Facebook scraping it’s good news because you’ve got the most out of it and you’ve managed to avoid having your account banned by Facebook. But playtime is over and now it’s time to play by the rules. Don’t think that Custom Audiences are useless without this shortcut, they’re still the most effective way to target users on Facebook. You’ll just have to find a good strategy to legally attract leads to add to your audiences. Luckily the opportunities for this are endless: offer ebooks, webinars, freebies, tools… all in return for the users’ emails.

If you’ve avoided Facebook scraping (well done!) it’s good news because this move from Facebook levels the playing field. Your competitors and other advertisers will have to follow the rules and won’t have an unfair advantage over you from using underhand tactics any more. But the really good news is that right now they’re probably lost. They’ve developed their strategy around a short-lived trick and now have to start again from scratch, while you’ve invested your time in mastering a great and long-lived Facebook Ads strategy… now it’s your turn to have the advantage!

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Comments

  1. Lily says

    September 13, 2014 at 1:39 am

    Does your system has the ability to create new custom audiences?

    Reply
    • Massimo Chieruzzi says

      September 13, 2014 at 2:16 am

      Yes it does, we have full Custom Audiences support and also have some features to make the process faster like 1 click to create lookalike audiences for multiple countries 🙂

      Reply
      • lucy says

        June 25, 2015 at 4:41 pm

        You’re talking crap

        You can still use fb email instead of the id only, if you bother telling the truth rather than selling your rubbish you would have pointed this out

        Reply
        • Massimo Chieruzzi says

          June 25, 2015 at 4:52 pm

          Hey Lucy,

          thanks for commenting. Sorry but you are wrong. You refer to a loophole that worked for a while (it was still illegal of course) and that Facebook blocked as well.

          You can read the announcement here: https://facebookmarketingpartners.com/partner-news/custom-audiences-will-no-longer-match-vanity-urls/

          Facebook is no longer matching facebook.com emails for custom audiences 🙂

          Reply
          • Dallas says

            July 30, 2015 at 6:44 pm

            Thanks for clarifying this – I’d tried uploading FB emails (hadn’t realised group exports were against TOS) and they weren’t being recognised – this explains it).

    • Dick says

      June 29, 2016 at 8:27 am

      You Can Still Use —EDITED—– To Get Real Emails From Search Engines And Url’s But It Can Inly Scrape Emails That Are Publicly Viewable With Being Logged In.

      Reply
      • Massimo Chieruzzi says

        June 29, 2016 at 10:25 am

        Edited the name of the tool. While it might or might not work, it’s against many countries’ privacy laws and for sure it’s against Facebook’s Terms of Services.

        Reply
        • dick says

          July 1, 2016 at 9:18 am

          does your software still have the ability to upload @fb emails for custom audience? i never got your response in my email the first time and why does the software i mention say edited? my email is mekhi66@gmail.com

          Reply
          • Massimo Chieruzzi says

            July 4, 2016 at 3:33 pm

            No software can do that. Facebook has totally banned Custom Audience creation from facebook.com emails for the simple reason that they were abused by scraping software.

            The sw you mentioned has been removed by me because we do not want to promote software that violates privacy laws and breaks Facebook Terms of Services. Custom Audiences are for advertising to users who gave consent to have their email used by you. Not a way to target total strangers by scraping their emails 🙂

  2. marcello says

    September 13, 2014 at 11:39 am

    Is it ok/legal to use Facebook ids gathered from 3rd parties like fliptop or klout?

    Reply
    • Massimo Chieruzzi says

      September 13, 2014 at 11:43 am

      No, you can read Facebook Custom Audience terms here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/customaudiences/tos.php
      You cannot use data of people that did not explicitly give you consent to use their data like a newsletter subscription.

      Moreover this new check in place won’t let you use those ids as they need to come from a Facebook App of which you are administrator.

      Reply
      • marcello says

        September 13, 2014 at 11:59 am

        Thanks for the reply, very helpful. What I have is really a custom interest segment, built from external data- I have no interest or intent to violate privacy, what I really want to do is sort of create my own fb interest target group. Can you think of any way to do this within everyone’s terms of service? I’d prefer to keep things anonymous!

        Reply
        • Massimo Chieruzzi says

          September 13, 2014 at 12:22 pm

          First thing, at least for now I don’t think this is gonna affect Custom Audiences that were already created, it’s only for newly created Audiences as far as I know.

          As of now I’d say that for Facebook User IDs the only way is to create a great tool that requires Facebook Login to gather potential leads ids. Of course you can also create Custom Audiences through emails. So for example you can use your newsletter’s subscribers to create a Custom Audience.

          It takes time unluckily but overall creating great content or tools that attract relevant users and gather their emails is the best and most legal way to get data for Custom Audiences. Then of course if the number is limited, you can create a Lookalike audience to get a bigger targeting group very similar to your leads.

          Reply
  3. marcello says

    September 13, 2014 at 12:37 pm

    Ok great insight, thanks!

    Reply
  4. James Pope says

    September 14, 2014 at 10:35 am

    You can import facebook emails to custom audience.Facebook Can’t stop it and it’s working fine.So it’s the time to get a “Facebook Email Scraper” instead of “Facebook ID Scraper”

    Reply
    • Massimo Chieruzzi says

      September 14, 2014 at 10:19 pm

      Yes, you can scrape emails but that won’t be as quick&easy as scraping the users in a laser-focused Facebook group.

      Reply
    • marcello says

      September 15, 2014 at 9:35 am

      That’s an interesting alternative, are you talking about my.name@facebook.com address that each user has? I can see how that would work, but by can’t stop it do you mean it is within their terms of service or just not shut down by the app-scoped thing?

      Reply
  5. Filip Galetic says

    September 17, 2014 at 3:59 am

    Seriously? Your only advice is to attract people to download crappy ebooks and white papers? Internet is flooded with this crap and there is still no way to easily promote that content to targeted audiences anymore. Facebook just shot themselves in the foot with this. Their precise interests and lookalike audiences are crap.

    Reply
    • Massimo Chieruzzi says

      September 17, 2014 at 4:33 am

      I didn’t say crappy 🙂 If you produce high quality content that’s an extremely effective way to promote your business, if you create crappy content of course you won’t get a lot out of it. I don’t think Facebook shot itself in the foot by killing a black hat tactics which was also likely against privacy laws of 90% of the world.

      Reply
      • sam says

        September 18, 2014 at 12:15 pm

        What do you think about using the Facebook emails for the custom Audience. Maybe this will be more difficult to scrape but do you think that FB will ban fname.lname@facebook.com from being uploaded into custom audience?

        Reply
  6. Dino says

    October 12, 2014 at 10:53 pm

    What’s the legal perspective of using a Data File Custom Audience? Assuming that all lead-gen activities are above board (ebooks, opt-ins to newsletters, etc.), but you’re using a standard stock privacy policy (i.e. doesn’t mention Facebook at all), are you legally allowed to target those people using a different platform (in this case, Facebook)?

    Reply
    • Massimo Chieruzzi says

      October 12, 2014 at 11:41 pm

      I don’t think there’s a big problem with that. It would be better to include in the privacy that you’re gonna use the data for advertising purposes as well but overall what matter to Facebook is that those users have a relationship with you and have agreed to have their data managed by you. Just remember that when they unsubscribe from your list you should also quickly remove them from your Custom Audience.

      Reply
  7. Daze says

    October 29, 2014 at 7:29 pm

    Hello, I have sent a few emails to support@ faXXXXXXscraper.com but haven’t received any response so I am assuming that the software is no longer available or that the website is idle. I was interested in purchasing the software and needed an invoice.

    Thank you for your assistance in advance.

    Reply
    • Massimo Chieruzzi says

      October 30, 2014 at 11:01 am

      Don’t know this specific tool but anyway don’t waste your money, they’ve become useless.

      Reply
  8. shadowwalker says

    November 2, 2014 at 7:56 pm

    you are complaining about fb scrapping evils and how companies that misused key words were closed down but that is exactly what you are doing you are manipulating your audience by using scary words such as shut down or banned so they think of the worst case scenario which very rarely happens

    Reply
    • Massimo Chieruzzi says

      November 3, 2014 at 7:43 pm

      Thanks for commenting, I don’t honestly think the tone of the article is exaggerated or has the intention to scare people off. Actually it would be pointless since Facebook has cracked down on this tactic and you can no longer scrape UIDs.
      The point is not about scaring people, the point is making the aware of the risks the’ll incur running after the latest Facebook Ads hacks. And I don’t know how much you value your time, but from my point of view the biggest risk is not an unlikely ban of the page but it’s wasting your times building a marketing strategy around something which is just a hack and will stop working any day from now.

      Reply
  9. Karthik says

    December 22, 2014 at 1:39 am

    Is this rule applies to the Mobile advertiser IDs? Since we collect the android advertiser ids using our sdk and when we tried those ids for creating the custom audience large percentage of ids shown as invalid.

    Reply
    • Massimo Chieruzzi says

      December 22, 2014 at 10:29 pm

      Hey Karthik, as far as I know this rule does not apply to Mobile Advertser IDs as that should not be something you can scrape. Also there should not be any problem if you’ve acquired the IDs through your own app.

      Reply
  10. Chris Hayes says

    February 16, 2015 at 10:44 am

    Shame I missed the boat on this one lol. I’m just getting into FB advertising.

    What would you say is that best way to target a highly responsive audience now that you can’t target UIDs?

    Reply
  11. Chris says

    April 5, 2015 at 4:55 pm

    Yeah as you said the blackhat tactics are just for short time and we better play using rules but the problem is that facebook will be saturated while everyone tries to market something unuseful just to make cash

    Reply
    • Fedge says

      May 16, 2015 at 7:25 pm

      That’s called advertising.

      Reply
  12. London Trades says

    April 20, 2015 at 9:46 am

    As I understand it you can create a CA from an external list of emails that you supply as long as it is a list of users “you have a relationship” with. So in theory, you could scrape targeted lists of user emails from a variety of sites, create some pretty decent audincs, upload them and then serve targeted ads on FB accordingly.

    Is this allowed by FB or do they have some compliance validation the advertiser has to serve prior?

    Reply
    • Massimo Chieruzzi says

      April 20, 2015 at 10:03 am

      Are you asking if Facebook can detect that you’ve scraped emails or if it’s compliant with ToS and local laws ?

      It’s unlikely that Facebook can understand if a list of emails was scraped or acquired legally. Only way would be if they receive many complaints from users.

      Yet using scraped emails is still against Facebook’s Terms of Services and various counties privacy laws.

      Reply
  13. Tristan says

    June 14, 2015 at 11:44 am

    Hello,

    Does anyone know: Is it still technically possible to use the ‘fbusername@facebook.com’ e-mail address to create a a Custom Audience — without having to specify a particular app (as is now required with the UIDs).

    i.e. Use the FB email address, not the user’s normal e-mail to create the Custom Audience.

    And if so, isn’t this a pretty gaping loophole? I mean, why did Facebook even block harvested UIDs for Custom Audience if you can still harvest the usernames (and thus the Facebook email addresses) to create the Custom Audience?

    Unless I’m missing something here?

    Cheers 🙂

    Reply
    • Massimo Chieruzzi says

      June 14, 2015 at 5:25 pm

      Hey Tristan,

      using @facebook.com emails instead of UIDs was a loophole that worked for a while but last week Facebook put an end to it: https://facebookmarketingpartners.com/partner-news/custom-audiences-will-no-longer-match-vanity-urls/

      From now on they should no longer be accepted. Maybe this is the end of Scraping once and for all 🙂

      Reply
      • Michael Kisyanto says

        June 23, 2015 at 2:04 pm

        So now.. how to get targeted lazer audience for facebook ads Fast… any suggestion? Thx..

        Reply
        • Massimo Chieruzzi says

          June 24, 2015 at 8:25 am

          You can use Interest Intersection, or you can build lists in a legit way offering lead magnet and building a database. If you are in US you can also test advanced demographic targeting and behaviors!

          Reply
  14. Sayonara says

    December 14, 2015 at 11:59 am

    Hi,

    How effecting is it target via CA with their email details?

    Say If their Facebook login email address is abc@gmail.com, and while they opted in for ebook.. They key in xyz@gmail.com… And when I upload xyz@gmail.com into CA for targeting.. Will my ads reach them in Facebook?

    Logically it doesn’t seem possible, but just want to reconfirm this. Tq

    Reply
    • Massimo Chieruzzi says

      December 15, 2015 at 11:50 am

      Of course if they use totally different email that’s gonna be a problem and Facebook is not gonna be able to match them. But overall when you do Custom Audiences you want to have a decent amount of emails, at least 1,000 in my opinion. On average Facebook will match 70% of them, so it’s still a great way to reach users.

      If the match rate is too low for you, you may consider using Website Custom Audiences instead and simply targeting everyone who visited the thank you page of your lead magnet. You may be able to reach more users this way (and it’s easier to setup and keep up to date)

      Cheers,
      Max

      Reply
  15. surendra says

    December 22, 2016 at 5:19 am

    what if I have a retail store, my customers gave me ids in a hard copy paper form. Can I upload those ids?

    Reply
  16. syed says

    September 25, 2017 at 5:37 pm

    hi. may I know..if I manually collecting any phone numbers of sellers (they shown in their sales post)..then I use it on custom audience. Is it possible fb detected as scraping too?

    Reply
  17. János says

    February 8, 2018 at 7:37 am

    How to get email of a Facebook user? Do you know any online service, database where for money I can buy a Facebook user’s email address? I need this to be able to create Facebook Custom Audience. I know many stores offer ebooks, webinars, freebies, tools… all in return for the users’ emails.

    Reply
    • Flavia Caroppo says

      February 8, 2018 at 12:48 pm

      You can’t, it’s illegal. Facebook doesn’t share users’ data.

      Reply
  18. DS says

    May 10, 2018 at 4:50 am

    Is the loophole closed by now or is it still possible via adespresso to upload scrapped FB data to create custom audience?

    Honestly, I dont understand the big issue about it. Yes you should be able to scrap personal data such as e-mail addresses, but I think what most marketers really want (speaking for myself) is just to get public anonymous data of who followes certain pages to eventually provide them with relevant content (ads) which is what facebooks wants for their users as well! I’m staggered that FB doesnt even just have the option to target audiences that follow certain pages (an no “interests” is not a substitute).

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Custom Audiences update: No more 'scraping' Facebook user IDs - Inside Facebook says:
    September 19, 2014 at 10:18 am

    […] Massimo Chieruzzi, CEO of Facebook PMD AdEspresso, discussed the problem with this approach in a blog post: […]

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