How to Share a Facebook Advertising Audience or Pixel

[NOTE: This post has been updated and completely rewritten from an original publication.]

If you are a consultant, work for an agency, or ever need to advertise for others — or are a company working with someone who manages your Facebook ads — you may need to share a Facebook pixel or advertising audienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More.

You can do this. Both parties need to have Business ManagerEvery organization should have their own Business Manager to organize their assets (pages, ad accounts, pixels, and more), and then provide appropriate access to those assets to partners. More accounts. You can share a pixel with a partner. You can share an audience with an ad account. Everyone will rejoice.

As we move forward, we’ll look at this from the perspective of the consultant, agency, or entity that needs access to the pixel or audience.

Let’s take a closer look…

Why Share Audiences and Pixels?

If your client is an established brand that has advertised on Facebook before, they likely have the Facebook pixel on their website. They also may have audiences that they have used before that proved to be successful.

As a new advertiser working with this client, you can start from scratch with a new audience or leverage what was created before. Starting from scratch with a new pixel for optimizationThe Performance Goal is chosen within the ad set and determines optimization and delivery. How you optimize impacts who sees your ad. Meta will show your ad to people most likely to perform your desired action. More and tracking or a new custom audience for targeting is messy and will likely negatively impact results.

You’re going to want access to that pixel and those audiences. It’s time to talk about how.

Add a Partner to Business Manager

Hopefully, you and your client are already using Business Manager. If not, this will be required for what we’re going to do today. You can set up a new Business Manager account by going here.

Now, they can go to their Business Manager Settings.

Go to “Pixels” under Data Sources.

Select the pixel and click “Assign Partners.”

To grant you access to the pixel, they’ll need to enter your Business ID.

If you’re not sure what this is, click on Business Info at the bottom left of your own Business Manager.

You’ll see the Business ID at the top.

You should now have access to their pixel.

Share an Audience

In a perfect world, once your client adds you as a partner, they should be able to share both the pixel and any audience they want to share with you. Well, my friend. This is not a perfect world.

This is where it gets a little weird. You can share all kinds of stuff with a partner, including access to:

Pages
Ad Accounts
Catalogs
Apps
Pixels
Instagram Accounts
Offline Event Sets
Block Lists
Lines of Business
Custom ConversionsCustom conversions let you create rules for events or URLs so that you can better track and optimize for specific actions with Facebook ads. More
Leads Access
Domains

Custom audiences? Hello? No?

To share an audience (not a saved audienceA saved audience allows a Facebook advertiser to save often-used targeting settings to easily use later. More, but custom or lookalike audienceLookalike audiences allow advertisers to reach people who are similar to an audience of people already close to you. Lookalike audiences are based on custom Audiences, which tend to include your current customers or people who have engaged with your business. More), all they need to do is select the audience(s) they want to share and click the “Share” button.

If your ad account was already added to their Business Manager, they can simply select it here. Otherwise, they can enter your Ad Account number and click “Share.”